Lessing's Choice

I have been ignored for what I have to say is my whole life. I am ignored amongst family, friends and business colleagues. No one gives a shit what I have to say. So encountering blogosphere shunning should not come as a surprise.

I used to contribute posts to a blog that took its starting point the films of Brian De Palma. This was no ordinary fansite. It included film students, critics, and all sort of sundry film makers. The conversations extended beyond the apparent disconnected facts and data regarding particular De Palma films. It also avoided the typical issues of the life of celebrity film maker Brian De Palma. Instead it dealt with the craft, the themes, the issues of film making that Brian De Palma and his movies had raised. In a relatively intelligent manner, this web page brought up issues of philosophy, politics, history, ethics, aesthetics as these issues emerged in the films of De Palma (and ultimately elsewhere). Yes there were plenty of analyses of predecessors and epigoni. However, the site dealt with all sorts of issues that could really carry on the conversation (as an Oakeschott or a Rorty) could appreciate. When I first contributed, I found thoughtful and appreciative respondents to what I wrote. However, as time went on, I became more irascible, and I found myself in pariah status with the web site monitors as well as with the other contributors. Perhaps I made excessive statements. Perhaps I picked fights. Nonetheless, I found myself alone in my own comments. Other contributors began regularly ignoring my remarks, and I found that what I had to say became simple reactive inanities to what was not said. I found myself in a cyber world of solipsistic criticism that made impossible the necessary friendly criticism of me that allowed me to see myself. What I wrote became so distasteful to others that I was no longer worth acknowledging.

This is a tend with other sites I attend. Whether it is the Leo Strauss group or the Postmodern Conservative blog, my career as a writer has followed a similar trajectory. First, I am one of the most interesting an scintillating of respondents (even if I exaggerate my excellence). Then I become a writer to whom others refer. I become a benchmark of sorts for those who wish to offer a dissenting opinion. Then comes the remarks that "Presnall" sounds like something of a crank. Which is followed by complete disregard by the other writers and respondents, concluding in a complete silence to anything I write. All this leads me talking to myself.

I suppose my utter disregard for following the arguments of others in the name of what I consider where the truth leads me inevitably leaves me in my own solipsism. This of course makes it sound like I defend the radical questioning of convention. This is not necessarily true. Instead, I am a radical critic of such radical critique. This double critique confuses many as they naively wish to say something worthwhile in the surety of their own opinion. However, I tend to wish to deflate such ambitions to speak what is worthwhile. My own standards are ridiculously high, and these standards make me hated by those who speak persuasively to others in the terms that most can accept. In the best of rhetorical traditions, my friends and I--whether on the De Palma page, the Strauss page, or the PomoCon page--share a concern with the same questions. What motivates us to thought, wonder, or questioning is the same. We share a sense of the general parameters of the human problem--socially, politically, theologically, culturally politically. Not to sound like a sociologist of a Dilthey or Mannheim type, but we share the same content in terms of what is at stake in our questions. We are all Gadamerians here. Nonetheless, given what I write, they just don't care for what I have to say in response to these fundamental issues.

I used to think my shunning was due to my lack of learning. There are some huge big brains and some of the most erudite and thoughtful human beings writing on these pages. It is intimidating to find myself writing in such company. However, I came to realize that I am quite erudite and learned too--if not as much as or even moreso than some of the others writers frequenting these web pages. Hence, I judged that the shunning had less to with erudition than a judgment of my character. In this view I am not only ignorant but distasteful. I tend to state things wrongly or in a way that is not fitting. So it was all a personal criticism of me and my character.

What do you do in such a situation? Do I embrace myself and say 'fuck you" to all your shit-for-brains (SFB) accounts of the way you alll don't understand me? This seems too extreme and beyond my own sense of self-uncertainty. Do I try to figure out why I don't fit in and try to remediate the problem? I have given up on trying to fit in since I was in high school--at the earliest. I have never fit in and so I don't care for that. Perhaps all this is the problem, but it seems to me overly simplistic. I myself have no problem following the law, adhering to conventional morality, and performing the duties of family, career and country--in fact I have excelled in these things on several occasions.

I am only left to conclude that it is my opinions which are nefarious. I will admit that I cannot articulate my opinions in the best manner possible in every argument. I am not the best writer, wordsmith or rhetorician in the world. Perhaps I need more study more in order to speak my mind, since I do not know everything in literature, history and politics. Maybe I need to specialize more and then I could have a basis of particular authority from which I could speak to a more general audience. But I am pretty well knowledgeable of all sorts of specifics--much more than many people I know. I am too specialized. So, to state it again, it is my opinions that are dubious. Perhaps I'm specialized in the wrong things, but this assumes that there are specialists who can truly take their knowledge and translate it to the truth of the whole for what is needed to know. As if there were an important statement that could be made in a way that way others could assent to. I doubt it. Others simply don't like what I have to say.

So what is it I have to say? I doubt the things that people in my position think are important. I'm not stupid. I recognize the need to mask one's own opinions. In fact I do it all the time. I recognize that I don't hold the absolute truth in absolute knowledge. I qualify what I say--even if I am a student of Hegel. I may recognize that knowledge in the modern world resorts to knowledge or education in a circle--encyclopedia. But I never state it as such. I like to be an empiricist too. I stick to the facts like everyone else.

I think I become anathema because I call out the truth of all empiricism which is the dog philosophy of cynicism. This at least explains the basis of my rhetoric. However, the first thing I aim my cynicism towards is cynicism itself. I hate deflationary, self-spirited rhetoric for its own sake. This gets me into trouble because I like to prick the balloons of any and every cynic.

So I have no positive teaching. I am all negative. Admittedly I am no reformer. I cannot tell you how to lead your life. To be sure, I have standards. They are true and right too. But I have no way of making you live become what is the true and right life. I try to persuade toward what is called philosophy. In contrast to philosophy, coercion leads to an ignorant lawlessness which is lawful on the basis of the fear of punishment--but there is a tradition that one is dragged by the scruff of one's neck out of the cave. Is coercion itself the basis of philosophy? But who drags anyway?

Lacking someone to drag us out of the cave, or lacking the insight of one's own that images are images, it seems that we need a god who metes reward and punishment. Perhaps such fear--including fear of divine punishment--is our lot. I suspect a lot of our current moralizers (on the one hand) and philosophers (on the other) just simply want to keep fear of divine punishment in its place. I have no desire to destroy this belief either, but when I call out others of their obfuscating this issue, they get angry and then they ignore me.

So I will continue to think and write what I say, and I won't pretend to speak frankly of philosophy and god is dead while at the same time pretending that god is the ultimate judgment of one's particular and personal sense of life. Why not just say say--fideistically--that god is judgment? Why come up with so many sophisticated arguments in a post-theistic age?Don't worry about it. The cat is out of the bag. God is dead, and no matter what kind of rhetoric is deployed cannot cover the fact--this deadly truth as Nietzsche puts it.

So we should return to first questions. Reason and revelation. Ancients and moderns. Philosophy and poetry. Law and life. Rule and discretion. Theory and practice. Public and private. Individual and community. Progress and return. Transmission of the past and rejection of the future. Athens and Jerusalem--or Rome? or Mecca!

Lessing posed the question of God with two hands. Long before the red or green pill of the poplar movie The Matrix, Lessing picked up on the ancient myth of God offering two hands. One hand was the life of eternal questioning--the joy and adventure of seeking after that which can be known even to the point of never knowing it. This mode seeks after newness and is interminably unsatisfied. It maybe happiness, but it is unsatisfied in its answer. It thinks honesty, probity, redlicheit is what the best way of life is for a noble and true human life. One should never rest certain anything. In this hand, the knife edge of continual questioning the most fundamental things must be one's fate.

The other hand of God holds the answer to every deep question that stems from the deepest erotic longing. These are the answers to the kinds of longings that plague you in even in the midst of your own most self satisfaction. These answers provide relief to such an unspeakable longing that it is satisfaction in such a way that one need not nor ever wish to seek beyond what already is (or what has been given). Such knowledge provides the confidence of facing up to the challenges of this world because there is nothing that can challenge the ultimate truth of what one already has. This is not smugness, but clarity regarding what is truth. It is true enlightenment.

This is an eternal dispute between unbelief and belief.

Given the response to what I write, I guess I have an ineradicable unbelief. An ineradicable, ontological unbelief. I am not happy with such a situation, but that should be expected in such a mode of life. So be it. It makes no friends even if friends are what I desire. My probity says there are no friends even if my desire wishes for them to be. Derrida in his lectures of friendship liked to quote Montaigne quoting an old saw, "My friends, there are no friends." I guess this is where I am. Derrida in the same lectures then examines the question of the enemy in Carl Schmitt. Unfortunately, this is my position. I don't endorse Schmittian politics, and I whish to choose Socrates over Polemarchus, but I have no friends nonetheless.

The typical response is like a pop song, "You only give what you get."

This is my giving.

All of this navel gazing certainly explains my anathematic position regarding the De Palma, Strauss, or PomoCon blogs. Who would want to read such a self indulgent asshole as me?

Pinball Wizard

Truly a great song by the Who. But I always wondered what deaf, dumb and blind meant. Like the crowd I wondered how he did it. "How do you think he does it?"

But the more you think about bumpers and flippers, one wonders if one does not always stand like a statue playing by intuition. These things provide for externalized ways of living one amongst another. Pinball, blindness, deafness, and dumbness have no community.

Pinball is a pretty lame image to make this case insofar as it is dated--but pinball, with its jerky shuffling of the ball, may be a true image of how one must make one's way in the world in modern bourgeois, democratic, capitalistic, liberal societies these days. The pinball image may not hold up, but let me nonetheless hand my pinball crown to Pete Townsend for attempting to speak about what is true.

You may ask--what is true in a silly song about gaining recognition for mastery at something as ridiculous as pinball for one who is deaf, dumb and blind? Of course, it is easily answered in the see me, feel me, touch me, heal me refrain. But what does all this mean? Listening to you, gazing at you and following at you. Right behind you and on you I see the glory and get the story.

The you is surely important here, but so is the me that can't hear, see or speak.

This must be some sort of social psychology put to music. Is it typically Lockean in that we have no judge with common authority by nature? Is it Hobbesian in the ways in which Tommy's fame leads to the one answer to all questions?

Is it the typical British Marxist stance that popular culture serves as an anodyne for the suffering of the working class. The sigh of the oppressed in an alleviating opiate that shows itself in the new sensation of Tommy's fame?

Carlito's Way Again

Just thought I would return to the masthead image. I am thinking of changing it, but for now here's Joe Cocker. I wish I could find the dance scene in the Paradise picture.

Children

In my lonely single life, I find myself loving children more and more--especially in their impertinence. Children require adults to provide the loving guidance and education that only we adults can give them as they become themselves despite our best efforts. In the redundancy of the ordinary day to day life that we present, children are a blessing in their sheer newness.

It is true that we live in the present with our enlightened morality of free choice and individual self creation, and we are attempting to make the next generation so free that choice becomes an end in itself. We love something called autonomy. However, let's hope that "nature" will reassert itself and have nothing to do with our contemporary cleverness. The '60s and '70s and '80s were all about "rock 'n roll" and "punk rock" and thinking that one can make it alone. This thinking that one can make it alone leaves one thrown back on oneself, and in a strange Tocquevillian move leads one to follow what everyone else does. One's own self creation becomes conformity--how else to explain the ubiquity of tattoos these days?

You may say, "Presnall, you're full of shit. I've got a job, and it's important. I do (or even make) things, and in my activity (or productivity) I do something at least useful to myself. At least I make a paycheck." Let me suggest that your work is simply the flip side of the coin to your rock 'n roll autonomy. Your job is probably an abstraction--like most jobs these days. You can measure your life according to what television or other credentialized agencies consider to be rigorous self assessment. You and your company may even claim to "bring good things to light." However, what do you presently hold in custodianship that is worth holding for all time? What have you inherited that is worthwhile? What do you have to pass on--other than the skills which you yourself admit are damned for the planned obsolescence that you yourself have set up?

So, outside of theology or philosophy, children become the key to happiness in our time as it has been always. As one gets older--if there are no young ones around (especially young ones of one's own)--life becomes a meaningless game and one might as well commit suicide. Let me make a caveat for priests who find God, philosophers who find truth, and tyrants who find rule. The rest is pale pragmatism calculating the best way to stay alive for no other reason than that one fears death--it's a perfectly ordinary Hobbesianism.

Children--on the other hand--are by definition impertinent, and as a consequence they are a rebuke to any so-called postmodern self-creation. They're beyond the grandiosity of autonomy and production.

Children are fecundity too, and when they are one's own they provide an impermeable barrier to the seemingly inevitable growth of what Alexandre Kojeve called the Universal and Homogeneous State where each is recognized equally in his autonomy and productivity--a condition that Leo Strauss said had the potential of becoming a universal tyranny. So get philosophy, God, or children now! Fight the inevitable tyranny and defend one's own. Besides, with our aging population, who will care for us when we're elderly (i.e., dependent and unproductive) if not those impertinent children--whether or not they are our own?

Otherwise we're lucky if our fate becomes something similar to Sol's (Edward G. Robinson's) in Soylent Green. And this is a fate, despite its expressions of love, that is worthwhile avoiding.

Marshall Crenshaw

Listening to hipster music has led me to listening to music that is not worth hearing. It must be that I hear some tune that represents what is the most music on the edge. It used to be Radiohead as the most interesting. Coldplay, Dinosaur jr., or the Cure. There are New Zealand band which must be the latest of rock 'n roll. My friend Britt who eternally must be on the cutting edge of music (let's hope they are from New Zealand , and that they have done lots of heroin.)

So you may as well listen to that nonsense. Right now I'm listening to Allman Brothers. So that lame story can be made fun of, but I can change the song right now. For instance, I have now presented Matthew Sweet "Do It Again." Needless to say you guys suck regarding your deep meaning of making the lies about how cool I am.

Kalev Pehme's Blog: Poetry, Philosophy, Slow and Close Reading

Kalev Pehme has decided to blog. This doesn't mean that he will tell us every detail of his life. Rather it means that he will provide rich reflections on philosophy. He has offered an initial taste of what it means to blog in Pehmeian manner. Indeed, that manner is something he calls "anti-blogging."

What is an anti-blog? Mr Pehme has already indicated what it is with four slow and close readings of Leo Strauss' account of Plato's Republic--from The City and Man. In these posts he addresses important things Socratic and Platonic. In his running commentary, he stops to ask some obvious questions that are rhetorically implicit in Strauss' writing. For instance, the first piece has some instructive remarks about irony and the nature of Platonic and Socratic speech--a theme which Strauss himself makes explicit.

In sum, Mr. Pehme is providing some worthwhile blogging--or anti-blogging as he would have it.

I also like the picture of the tree lined path that he uses as the masthead. This picture is indicative of the kind of contemplative thought that one can only have while on a journey.

Check it out.

Thoughts on Our Present Discontent

The first thing that should be said in debates regarding what is good these days is that no argument is authoritative, and hence anyone bearing credentials of authority is merely another instance of the game of garnering authority through power. To be sure, one should always argue in terms of the Constitution if one is arguing a serious issue in American politics. As Tocqueville said, in America all political questions become legal questions. Likewise, if one is arguing in terms of the Catholic Church, then one should rely on doctrine, canon law, and the authority of the church, which in the end relies on papal encyclicals. But these things have become mere historical curiosities these days. One wonders if the constitution and the church as authoritative institutions are merely regnant of some antecedent belief in morality that has been destroyed by the belief that all men are created equal--or at least by a bastardized version of equality understood as relativism which is nothing other than the application of democracy to moral thought itself. This relativism, it seems, is the truth of things today.

But to return to the first thing, if the polity or the church are no longer authoritative these days then neither is anything else. This includes science--even with its demonstrative rhetoric of "studies show." It is true that the church, the polity, and the modern research institution--in terms of their own definition--allow for disagreement within themselves (and serious disagreement at that). They provided in the past the very place of disagreement. They provided a place of legitimacy for argument itself. However, nowadays those places no longer exist as a place. The polity, the church or the university are riddled with self-seeking placement, and they replicate this reality through sophistical reasons defending their power as truth. Instead of loci for serious debate and discussion, disagreement within and between these institutions has been these days securely been placed under the aegis of Hobbes's notion of the state of nature. This is a place with no common judge, and a place where each and every one can say and do what is what. Who are you to tell me what to do? becomes the mantra of this age as each person figures out what is right for his or herself. Following this Hobbesian logic, each sector of former institutional authority must Leviathan-like subdue the other children of pride. It goes without saying that in this scenario there is no truth without aspiration to absolute power.

At this point--enter the mass media. The media have become the definition of debate. They are a marketplace of ideas as Holmes had it. This situation becomes the contemporary understanding of democracy as one reads it from the New York Times--the religious ritual of those who are correct thinking as Thoreau had it. John Rawls, the good liberal that he was, tried to make a theory of democracy on this basis. He argued that there can be a modus vivendi amongst these different institutional worldviews without at the same time endorsing any comprehensive doctrine. Behind a veil of ignorance one can still come up with a common good that makes for an overlapping consensus. Yet, this consensus--overlapping or otherwise (general will?)--is merely a way of restating Hobbes's Leviathan in the technocratic language of the higher journalism, e.g. The New York Review of Each Other's Books.

I recognize that many--like Marx and Nietzsche and Freud and Foucault in their different ways--point out the impossibility of this "market" which allows for a "self" that can say what is what in relation to others. Each of these writers in his own way points out that no one is saying what is said. As Nietzsche put it, I don't think. It thinks. Perhaps this is true--but it is still the I that thinks that the I doesn't think. All these proto post-modern thinkers simply carry over the Hobbesean state of nature to new and future circumstances. What remains central to their project is that there is no common judge and each and every one can say and do what is what.

So this brings me to a conversation I had the other night with my friend Roger. We were drinking a few beers at the local watering hole. We got onto the question of happiness and how one finds it--especially in terms of human sexuality (or eros). Is there a a solution to human erotic longing? It came to light in a discussion about movies, but it was also a discussion that was interspersed with saying hello to various acquaintances, as well as to occasional comments about the typical clientele at this bar. It was a privileged position, which if the first thing is to be remembered, has no authority. In other words, we were bullshitting.

I made the point that there are no rules regarding love and lust these days. Male or female, romantic or cynic, gay or straight, traditionalist or liberationist--it is an open world. If there is a rule, it seems to be the central command of contemporary culture that we must enjoy this situation (cf. Slavoj Zizek). However, there used to be a time when the command was to follow the unwritten rules handed down from time immemorial. This old fashioned way led to all kinds of pain and suffering. The young woman had to choose safety over love. The young man had to divest himself from his charm for the boredom of matrimony. The homosexual was forced to live a life of lies. I could add others, but regardless, this is where the unwritten but nonetheless inscribed rules left one. It led to all sorts of unhappiness--and who knows if it led all kinds of "mental illness" (to use the invented term that the very last generation which seriously dealt with these tensions called it). Nonetheless, the folks that lived in terms of the old rules were the ones who fought wars, worked hard, raised families, and didn't bitch too much about their unhappiness--though their grievances were easily read between the lines in the best of their literature.

This sense of old fashioned rules is obviously not our scene these days. Old fashioned rules are shunned, even if they are missed as indicative in the various retro arty scenes. However, let me submit that it is a good thing that the old rules are gone. They led to all sorts of--once again to borrow the lingo of that last generation--neuroses. That said, the old rules prescribed behavior that was known by all, whereas the new way is anything goes. There was a good reason to get rid of the old rules, it seems to me, even if their rejection wasn't thought all the way through. The old rules required duty, self-sacrifice and hard work. The new rules were simply pleasure, freedom, and doing your own thing. The old rules made doing the right thing painful. The new rules allowed you to follow your bliss, and this was considered to be the right thing. To be sure, this following of bliss did not mean irresponsibility, but it allowed you to make it up as you went. This led to the beautiful array of human types to show themselves, but in the absence of rules there was a problem without a form to give them a material sense of what made one complete. It led to arbitrariness (on a side note, if you wonder why the TV show Lost ultimately sucked it was because of the application of the new rules of pure potentiality as arbitrary decision to things like plot and character). The new good was pure pragmatism--and on the most intimate and erotic level. The sexual revolution destroyed the old rules in the name of a free making of the rules. It wrought--amongst other things--feminism, abortion, two member working households, single moms, broken homes, doing your own thing, latch-key children, and the sensitive new age guy (i.e., the SNAG).

So, it seems to me, the sexual revolution is part and parcel of Hobbes's notion of each and every one being his or her own authority (or should I say following Nietzsche/Freud "its" own authority).

We are free to do so many things today. We have demolished those old rules. However, are we happier? I suspect that we are more confused and insecure. Those who say otherwise have either not heard the news, or are willfully blind. No one or no thing has authority over another. Remember, this is the first thing, but it is also the last thing.

The true question--given this circumstance--is whether the Leviathan has made such a situation possible (my opinion), or whether the Leviathan is our one and only future (the opinion of those who think their opinions still matter).

One must seriously study ways out of this predicament--i.e., Plato or the Bible. Either way would be better than this contemporary nonsense, but most these days would rely on their belief in therapy. Studies show, as it is said, that only therapy works. Or even better, the Prozac Nation of psycho-pharmaceuticals. If this is the solution, send me to the madhouse now!

For the time being, here the Modern Lovers speak of a norm (all irony included) with which I'm willing to live.