Matthew T Grant

“Oh, who can wonder at that old reproach against science, that it is atheistical?” – from The Confidence-Man, by Herman Melville

For a long time I’ve harbored the notion that enmity towards the Devil stems not from the bad things of which he is capable or to which he drives men. Rather, it arises from the fact that the Devil, in his infinite relativism, questions the hard-and-fast division of acts and events into “good” and “evil.” Thus, the truly satanic perspective says, “There is a reality prior to your ethics, even your perception, and it knows neither good, nor evil; good and evil are post-hoc projections onto this neutral stuff.”

Of course, this is precisely the view of science which suggests that all matter is built up from fluctuating, quantum states of energy (or something like that – look, I’m not a scientist.) Science does not see any particular moral value inscribed in the hierarchy of electron shells, Avogadro’s number, or Planck’s constant. Ethical norms are epiphenomenal.

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Funny what sticks in the craw.

I was doing a search for this pamphlet, Theory of Poverty, Poverty of Theory, a strange, Situationist tract that I bought in Berkeley long ago, when I came across an abstract for Avital Ronell’s essay, “On the Misery of Theory without Poetry: Heidegger’s Reading of Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’.”

This essay, which I have not read, “[C]onsiders the tendency among young theorists to forget or repress poetry. As symptom, the aberrant dissociation of poetry from theory reflects an increasing technicization, not to say impoverishment, of critical language.”

I won’t go into why I believe Dr. Ronell finds the dissociation of poetry from theory aberrant, or why she paraleptically equates technicization with impoverishment (especially when one could just as easily see in the study of literary theory the root-cause of its student’s quite literal impoverishment).

Instead, I will focus, briefly, on the last line of the abstract, which reads, “I zero in on the figure of ‘dark-skinned women’ in the poem ‘Andenken’ to show how philosophy is tripped up by the permanent insurrection that poetry conducts.”

First of all, as you can see in my ad hoc translation of Hölderlin below, the women are “brown” [braun], not dark-skinned. The poem “takes place” in southern France, after all, where the grape-ripening sun also tans the limbs of those laboring in the fields twixt the Garonne and the Dordogne.

Secondly, I’m disturbed by the anthropomorphic dissociation of philosophy and poetry. Philosophy and poetry don’t conduct anything and suggesting they do removes them from the historical and material contexts in which they are conducted.

Finally, and along the same lines, I take issue with the figurative use of the term “insurrection” when speaking of Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin, especially given the poet’s known Jacobin sympathies. Specifically, when insurrection becomes solely metaphorical, it is not the poetical that is repressed, but the political. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a book called The Myth of Freedom by Chogyam Trungpa. It’s message is fairly straightforward: Everyone thinks of “freedom” in terms of “doing what you want to do.” What this formulation represses is the fact that we cannot free ourselves from wanting. At the core of our concept of freedom dwells an intractable kernel of compulsion. (In line with his Buddhist inclinations, Trungpa Rinpoche offers meditation as the diamond-hard hammer fit to crack this nut.)

When I was younger, I idolized people who were “doing what they wanted to do,” and perpetually lamented my own failure to join their ranks (somehow imagining that, in spite of the fact that I was doing many things, I was never quite doing what I wanted to do). I didn’t feel free.

Laugh if you want, but for a while Jerry Garcia represented this ideal of freedom – “doing what you want to do” –  in part because he seemed to be living the life I thought I wanted to live. But then I read something he said on the subject and it caught me up.

In his view, doing what you want to do is easy. First, do what you want to do. Then, don’t do what you don’t want to do. [Note: I’ve not been able to locate the source for this last bit. Will keep looking – Matt.]

While the stoned simplicity of this credo has its appeal, it rings false to me. “Don’t do what you don’t want to do” doesn’t sound like freedom so much as an avoidance of accountability and a refusal of responsibility. I understand that it can feel pretty free to be on the road playing gigs and taking drugs, but how free are you if you leave behind a trail of unfilled obligations, broken relationships and quasi-fatherless children? Are you “running free” or just “running away”?

Separating the moments of free action in our lives from those of mindless determinism is, on the one hand, a step towards maturity and self-awareness, and, on the other, utterly fruitless (as pointed out by Immanuel Kant). The important question isn’t, “Am I doing what I want to do?” The important question is, “Am I dealing with my shit?”

Image Courtesy of Damien.

Be yourself; it’s the perfect disguise. – M.L. Grim

I got reprimanded on Twitter the other day for equating transparency with invisibility.

For the record, I understand that “transparent” means “you can see through it,” not ” you can’t see it at all,” but that wasn’t exactly my point (though, as any bird who’s ever flown into a plate glass window will tell you, transparent objects can sometimes be devilishly hard to see at all).

Instead, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that calls for transparency in government and business, by relying on the common association of transparency with open, guileless communication, actually overlook the possibility that transparency can and often does serve as it’s opposite.

Take for example Jeremiah Owyang’s  twitteration from back in April, “Do you think corporate America will ever be as transparent as the Obama administration?” I responded that I understood transparency to be a plank in Obama’s platform and an important element of his branding, intended to differentiate his administration from the blatant secrecy of Cheney’s, but I expect and encourage him to mobilize  opacity whenever political or strategic necessity demands it.

Governments and corporations are not in the business of sharing their inner workings, plans, or intentions. Rather, they are all pursuing particular interests in a competitive environment where an unconditional openness would be foolhardy at best and suicidal at worst.

At the same time, game theory tells us that a measured openness, one that builds trust and facilitates alliances, can indeed be advantageous – so long as this openness is not seen as a “move,” in other words, an act which has as its conscious but obscured purpose self-interested gain, which it of course is.

Naturally, if the field is dominated by calls for transparency and everyone is rushing to “out-transparent” each other, an unapologetic secrecy becomes a legitimate, differentiating option, as we see in the case of Apple (though said secrecy is not without it’s own troubling consequences). Indeed, by clearly highlighting the extreme levels of secrecy maintained by your organization, governmental or corporate, you ultimately fulfill the new transparency imperative by being open about your closedness.

For my part, I do not place an absolute value on transparency and am immediately suspicious of anyone who wears their transparency on their sleeve. I can’t help but think, “They’re sharing so much with me. What are they hiding?

Image Courtesy of Arenamontanus.

When someone deems your actions “unethical,” they generally mean, “your actions do not conform to a specific ethical standard’s notion of ‘right action’ and thus belong to the category of  ‘wrong action’.”

When you ask them the basis for their ethics, they will have two possible answers. On the one hand, they will refer to an authority who has established the ethical code and infer that you should abide by the code out of respect or obeisance to said authority.

On the other hand, and this is the post-enlightenment tendency, they will justify their ethical standard in terms of practical or utilitarian concerns regarding the outcome of actions deemed wrong.

Here is where conflict arises. No ethical standards can be immediately or unproblematically derived from the world of phenomena, particularly when the phenomena in question are social in nature. The ethical conclusions drawn in this way from or against any particular act are dependent both on the detailed knowledge and accurate depiction of the human situation concerned – both areas in which certainty is, for the most part, provisional.

Dispute is always possible when we are describing situations in human life and particularly when we are claiming that, “given situation x, action y, will lead to outcome z.” In the realm of science, the experimental method stipulates that exceedingly rigorous conditions be met if someone is to even make the claim, let alone experimentally verify, that, given x, action y leads to outcome z. In fact, the experimental situation is intentionally artificial, the connections between x, y, and z demonstrably tight, and the conclusions peculiarly modest.

Unfortunately, in human life, given the number of variables involved in even the simplest interaction between two people, let alone the complexities inherent in the multiple highly interdependent or even very weakly linked interactions that compromise any social process, ethical standards that are justified in terms of “inevitable” outcomes of specific actions are either trivially few or unquestionably questionable.

Yet, herein lies the conundrum. If you question the ethical standard, you are pointed to the utilitarian reason behind it. If, however, you question the utilitarian reason,  you are quickly accused of questioning the ethic.

It becomes clear that the ethic itself is not seen as the product of social consensus and thus open to revision or dispute. The apparent argument from utility reverts to an argument from authority. Thus, if you are questioning the ethic, you are implicitly questioning the authority. If you are questioning the authority, you are in opposition. If you are in opposition, you are an opponent. If you are an opponent, you must be overcome.

Any conflict that cannot be resolved via dialog and compromise, must be resolved by force. While such a resolution may be “comprehensible,” to the extent that it follows the laws of physics, for example, it will not be “reasonable.”

Disputes over ethics are sad and the sadness stems from weakness. The proponents of a particular ethical standard resort to force in order to silence opponents because, sadly, they do not possess the power that could transmute their ethic into law.

Image Courtesy of “T” altered art.