Consent

I worry that with myself and HG we represent a terrible, radical strain, and even if people could read us, they would not, and probably should not, because certain forms of material analysis wreak very terrible consequences.

That being said, one area where I have become more and more radicalized of late is in the area of consent. The concept is absurd: a phantasm upon which we rely so heavily. I have recently been reading Lon Fuller's "The Morality of Law," and my goodness, I agree with its destructive aim whole-cloth. Yet he returns to Anglo liberalism, and that positive project mystifies me. But I digress.

Some Marxist theorists have interestingly, and in my view at least partly correctly, noted that duties and rights presuppose forms of exchange. I recently wrote a paper on the nature of legal obligation, stripped of all discussion of reciprocal exchange, and the project was difficult indeed. If we remove notions of duties arising out of CONSENT, we are left with the only possible picture of legal obligation as a negative one: we fulfill our legal obligations, I argue, when we act in such a way that we FAIL to have a mental state of duty. Hart's "internal aspect" (crudely, the subjective character of law-following, the qualia of law) identifies a place where we have, not a law-follower, but a law-breaker: a man who takes it upon himself to identify and assess the institution to which he belongs, phenomenologically separating himself from the social group. It is the Protestantization of law.

Again, this is a bit of a black box, because I am attempting to salvage rights and duties, and obligation, from a picture stripped of consent. At the very least we can agree that "rights and duties" are intimately (I would argue, inessentially) bound up with exchange.

Thus, men have rights and duties where there is, in some sense, consent to the rights and duties. Yet of course there is a kernal of non-consent that keeps the social order functioning, and which obliges promises to be kept. That is, I think, the exception that swallows the rule. But again, an aside.

We see in law CONSENT at every turn. Rape is legally (and morally) wrong because it is unconsented to. Court authority, jurisdiction, over a dispute can be challenged in certain cases, but tacit waiver, consent, is implied where formal checks are not met. Fail to object to the court's authority over your civil suit, and it is implied that you consent to the court's authority, and thus the court ACTUALLY HAS authority over you. Actions otherwise legally impermissible (battery) can be consented to (e.g. in a boxing ring).

Our present legal system is a mercantile, bourgeois edifice, built upon this foundation of consent. Yet this is precisely my question, which I believe to be truly unanswerable: is consent the foundation, or is it the edifice?

I have been describing consent as the foundation for our conceptions of morality and law. However, I would argue that this is false. Rather, consent was the aesthetic wedge with which the prior order was assaulted. Slowly men "disembedded" (as Taylor says) themselves (poor language of self-motivation, here, for they were also coaxed) from the social order, culminating in liberal notions of the self and of law. Yet the substance of the law remained largely unchanged as the self-understanding of the mass of people in fact did change. That is, the process of liberalisation was largely a function of the margins of society.

Yet once again we are in a period of upheaval, with the phenomenon upended this time. Here the substance of the law is changing as public and consent is being thrown away, but retained in areas where it serves ideological interests. Thus we see "free contract" derided rightly as a fetish, revealing the right of the state to regulate wages, landlord-tenant relations, and to appropriate land for the "public good."

But wait! This derision is purely superficial, because what is the remedy to this fetishization? We invalidate contracts that "couldn't possibly" have been consented to! We freeze social relations where one or the other party was not in a "free position!"

These are some random thoughts. My conclusion, as yet unsupported, is that consent is a term that resonates with bourgeois self-identity. As a result, it is used against that class to advance a particular social vision. This is why consent is lauded in the area of free divorce and rape, but consent is assaulted in the area of, for example, small landowning, injury risk, corporate contract, bankruptcy, experiment, and abortion. Consent is lauded when we seek to permit the licentious. Consent is attacked when it interferes with the march to the Gulag.

Question?

So who actually heard God say Nietzsche is dead?

Achievement

I operate in a world where intellectual achievement is revered and seen to have a sort of moral worth. But if intelligence is genetic, and therefore a person can't help but to be smart or dumb, then is the notion of achievement vacuous and akin to congratulating a person for having red hair? I realize that intellectual achievement takes other qualities, like patience, but I think my concern is still a real one (maybe we can say that patience is genetic too).

Legal Obligation

We say that it is wrong to murder. Let us take that as a given. We are obliged not to murder because it is morally wrong.

Now we say that it is the law not to murder. What additional obligation does this give us, and why?

A hypothetical

A scientist has information that demonstrates that your genes are slightly poisonous to the world, insofar as each generation after you that comes from your line will be 1 percent more destructive of the social good, whatever that means. If this were found out, society would have to kill you. You have the chance to destroy any trace of knowledge of this fact, and would leave the scientist undisturbed. What do you do? N.b., any answer claiming lack of worth in your life because all life is meaningless would not be fruitful, since if all life is meaningless, all life is meaningless.

Some assistance required

What is this, in Zizek?

"The easiest way to detect ideological surplus-enjoyment in an ideological formation is to read it as a dream and analyze the displacement at work in it."

I don't quite follow, although I like the idea. HOW exactly does one do this?

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm

Conceptual Analysis

(1) Anglo-American philosophy is myopic with its monistic view of conceptual analysis, seeking to obtain a list of necessary and sufficient criteria for a concept.

A more fruitful approach is extension, a pluralist approach, a list of examples.

A still more fruitful approach is aphorism, metaphor, trope, painting.

(2) On this continuum from formal analysis, through list, to metaphor, we can see the creative aspect of analysis. We can see that bound up in the project of the logothete (the namer) is the evaluative project. We live in a stream, in a senseless, ever-shifting world of images. The very creation of the self, the identification of discrete "things" in the universe, is artificial, is artifice, is a thing created. To pick "tree" out of a landscape, to identify "tree" as a UNIT, is to reveal our antecedent valuations, is to project an ALREADY EXTANT personality on the world.

Objective analysis is a blind alley. Speaking of "points of view" is not a tool to attain objectivity, but an expression of our limitations. That we can conceive of "points of view" and critique them pragmatically is simply evidence of our practical reason, our unproved, instrumental, and inherent ability to "separate" ourselves from our environment. It is not evidence of conceptual capability, or true objectivity.

(3) Thus we dispose of the liberal tradition.

A Half Full Look at a Half Empty Glass

Recently I was feeling a bit down about certain things. I was recommended to not be such a "negative nancy" and to have a more upbeat and appreciative tone. I think that the people suggesting this were actually conveying quite a pessimistic vision, ironically. They were saying that I should diminish my expectations if I am to be happy, and by taking on a more "realistic" expectation of what life has to offer in this certain department, I would be more satisfied. I think that their philosophy is tantamount to saying: PBJ, you should not be unhappy, because what you have is actually quite good relative to what is possible. That is, what is possible is worse than what I imagined. What a bunch of pessimists they are!

Post God, post Marx

My understanding of Marx is that he did not see immediate material gain as the highest good, i.e. he may have seen the world as one of material conflict but it did not entail that one obtains one's meaning from materialism per se. Nevertheless, there is a tendency among those of the Marxist, or alternatively, contemporary agnostic/atheist disposition, to believe that given that there is no god, man does not need to have a religion, i.e. man's greatest hope is to succeed in the material world (maybe this would also entail providing materially for one's family, or giving bread to the poor..., etc.). Of course I think that this sort of philosophy is quite deficient, and know this because I've felt totally materially "full" and yet still felt a lacking in my heart; that I would replicate this fullness in others can't be the end goal, for these individuals too would still feel a lacking... With that in mind, it is man's project, given that he can't rely on extrinsic metaphysical accounts, and likewise can't merely rely on satisfying his material needs, to build a life, i.e., to determine where he will now find God (which is in a sense a symbol for one's highest value, and so can be used by a nontheist without contradiction). This actually leads to my next idea, that centrally, man is driven by what he worships. This is actually a tautological claim: to say that man is driven by that which he worships is only to say that man is driven towards something (The only sense it would not be tautological is if one countered that in fact man is not driven towards anything and is just dust in the wind. I suppose if this were the case one can perhaps say that man is driven by Nothing, although this seems a bit strained). Given man has a drive, we can consider what he is driven towards. I know many people who seem only compelled by knowledge; for them, life has little meaning but to learn new ideas until one emulates an encyclopedia. I also know many who seem to be driven by status. For this man, it is of greatest achievement to be a member of the ruling class, and to feel like he has succeeded in the eyes of the majority. Next, I know of men who are driven by creative powers. They cannot but write, but draw, etc. Are all these modalities of worship of god? Is it rather the case that we are merely biding our time? I cannot be sure. But it is something I have luckily had the chance to explore of late. I can't really end this writing with anything consequential, as like all men I am still exploring; I still haven't found god.

The fecundity of dullness

The brilliant artist awoke and trembled, as was his habit. He had been frustrated for several days, as he knew that he was out of ideas. No. Rather, Man was out of ideas. Art had been destroyed by a vicious Postmodernist at Yale, and all that was left was shapes and colors, bearing little meaning and surely no aesthetic value (for how could there be value once the critique had so succeeded). The artist decided to create the only thing that could be created, Nothing. He did this by finding all the art that Man has created and incinerating it. A brilliant project this was, and it was extolled by all, as finally Man's creation's had caught up with his world.

The Unity of the Positive Law

In what sense is it meaningful to identify discrete laws?

Today, the health care bill passed. What does it mean for the bill to pass? All the institutional mechanisms are already in place: what additional work does a few men in a room raising and lowering their hands add? More deeply, why did I just identify the pertinent act as a room full of Congressmen?

Here's another way of asking the same question. How do we identify discrete laws? Is the law against speeding THAT law, or the law requiring the policeman to pull me over, or the authorizing bill to let the prosecutor prosecute me? Or what about the whole social framework that provides the funding and impetus for the system itself?

Rather, doesn't it make more sense to find these pragmatic distinctions formally meaningless? Isn't there nothing but the State, and the Law, the legal system, undifferentiated, complete, and claiming authority over the sum total of human behavior?

And aren't these distinctions, these identifications, the normative distinctions just that--- ethical / political / moral and profoundly bound up with notions of the POINT of the whole system?

Hear, hear!

Interviewer: Your book Literary Theory (1983) has sold almost a million copies. Do you enjoy writing for lay audiences?
Terry Eagleton: I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty.

Sometimes things may indeed be too complex for public understanding, but it is fair to expect that a professional thinker would do everything in his power to assure his research can be understood by as many people as reasonably possible. A professional philosopher does two things: 1. teach, 2. research/write. I really think that the first of these two job responsibilities is far too quickly dismissed as easy or mundane.

Man's nature

Is man good, evil, or neither? If man is naturally evil, can he be faulted as he is just acting according to nature? Is he held to a higher standard than animals because he has greater free will/intelligence?

Compendium of Good Songs

Recommend songs that you enjoy presently or always.
I'll start
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jQHKdNAWQo

Things which philosophy has not successfully provided answers to:

Ethics
Metaphysics (including the nature of the mind)
Aesthetics

Optimism and Pessimism

If these were the only two choices-- belief that things can't get better or belief that things can get better --- which would be better?

New Blog

This is the group blog of three gentlemen of good taste. Welcome!