Dreaming the Future Closer

[Warning: dense, presumes familiarity with Hegel] 

I daresay that most people who have made their way through any sizable portion of Hegel’s opus comes away with a sense of awe for the man’s intellect.  Many, to be sure, qualify that with a sense that there is something almost, well, too brilliant, too pure.  That history may so gracefully be ordered, progressively, by a series of dialectical movements just seems too good or too awful to be true.

And I think that qualification is pretty much spot on.  I think the idea of dialectics is spot on, brilliant even, but that it holds only for a single remove.  Dialectics breaks down, becomes mere abstraction, when its functions are linked together progressively. 

The reason may be put something like this: each dialectical movement is a leap forward of the understanding into confusion and a local resolution of it.  However, the resolution drawn is utterly local, related to the person(s) involved.  The movement can be resolved in a number of different ways, and each of those different (not contradictory) movements are dialectical so long as they are carried to their end.

This is, I suspect, the gist of Adorno’s concern.

Straw Dogs is one of the best works of skepticism that I have read.  I’m not talking about the tawdry I-don’t-believe-in-anything-but-science sort of skepticism, either.  This is the good ol’ Sextus Empiricus brand of philosophic thought.

Gray overstates more than a few of his points, over-relies on easy notions of natural selection, and tends to engage in the “you cannot have your cake, though I shall eat of it” problems.*  But there is a kind of cunning to all that which makes it clear that he knows this.  His style is reminiscent of moments in Nietzsche when he set outs, almost side by side, statements that suggest their own undoing.  There is a textual ‘wink’ and a sly smile behind it all.

Which brings me to what most impresses me.  The book is wickedly stylish.  Each section is, at most, a few pages long, containing tightly packed meditations that lay waste to many a cherished idol, revealing them to be, well, nothing more than straw dogs.  Each piece has been cut and crafted to say what it means and nothing more. 

The last work I read with this kind of care and craft might have been Adorno’s Minima Moralia.  The comparison is apt on many levels, too, when you consider the underlying pessimism and the easy way both have with quotation.  It’s sharp, cutting insight.

It’s inimitably British, full of easy-going pessimism and self-deprecating wit.  Sure, we humans may be headed for hell in a handbasket, but relax, we’re not really as important as all that.  Even when I don’t agree with the sentiment or the argument, I cannot but tip my hat to his presentation.

 *By which I mean that he criticizes several ways of conceiving history and humanity, while tacitly using them for his own rhetorical benefit.  For example, he dismisses the notion of ‘modernity’ as empty, a final shell for progressive morality, while making statements about polytheism being ”too delicate for modern minds.”  But, like I am about to say, there is a sense of deliberateness to that.

To every age its false idols, right?  We have to take care, of course, because the term comes loaded with implications, but its rich for that context.

We also need to be careful because, as much as I like the easy periodization, it’s not the case that one false idol simply disappears to be replaced by another.  The problem is more one of quality, of certain kinds of false idols playing a more prominent role in some times, in some places, than others.

One of our premier false idols: objectivity.  The idea of objectivity is noble and high, but the idol that has been made of it can be ugly, seductive, and destructive.  As an idol, those who rally to it believe they can lay claim to an objective truth proven by others that they can apply, almost without thought, to any situation.

Objectivity in its true, noble, form, is all about the struggle to extract from our personal struggles a lesson, a counsel, which we can offer up to another person.  It is about finding what is not just personal in our lives.  But that objectivity is passionately aware of how situated its counsel is.  It does not rule but speaks wisely.

Because being objective demands attempting to identify, to the best of your capacities, the real place from which and in which you speak.

Good science is objective in this way: here are these experiments, here are these labors, learn from them, learn how and when their lessons can be best applied.

False objectivity takes on the voice of absolutism, not speaking to but giving orders, imperative.  Those who follow this idol do not listen but demand to be listened to, they cite sources without reflection, trying to bolster their authority by proving their loyalty to their idol, objectivity.

Because false objectivity does not attempt to objectively understand its own position.  In not looking at its real place, it cannot appreciate the possible limits of the advice it comes to offer.

For this reason, false objectivity tends to swing between two kinds of lies: it either manically overapplies the advice it has to offer, conflating its truths for Truth or it veers into depressed nihilism, nothing is true or everything is true relativism.

It shows when we find people who claim to be counsellors speaking to those they counsel from scripts, when we find them working upon those who come to them, rather than listening to them, offering up what people have distilled into scripts, and then talking beyond those scripts.

We find it in the rabid atheist who denies others their experience of the divine, who reduces it to what is only one account of what goes on in the brain.  We find it in the fanatic who refuses to hear the sincerity, the humility, of someone who worships differently than them.  We find it among technicians who cannot see beyond the mechanics of their domain to the society it serves. 

Deleuze is fond of the phrase, “to be done with the judgment of God.”  This does not necessarily entail being done with either judgment or divinity.  It demands only that we cease to project ourselves into the position of “God.”  More than one soul who has abandoned God has not abandoned the position of absolute judgment.

And, luckily, we have those who, honoring the immensity of the divine and sacred world, have abandoned the judgment of God, but not judgment.  Who, mindful of their small but real place in the world, have set out to speak truly, to judge according to their wisdom, aware that their wisdom is only informed by the divine, not identical to it.

Dated 11/28/2005 (Edited to clean up a few typos) 

Rereading Adorno and Benjamin has brought to mind several important things.  First and foremost, that a philosophical account must not rest entirely upon an account of the subject, of the subject’s relationship to the world.  It must encompass the objective and not merely as the shadow of the subject’s actions. Second, that so much modern philosophy does just this, dwelling upon the ceaseless permutations of the Other rather than taking the steps required to place the self and other in the broader field of objects.  This lack of placement gives the Other and Self no content, makes of them empty forms that can sustain both too much (i.e. support multiple contradictory alternatives) and too little (provide no means for selection between competitors).  It strikes me that Deleuze, too, has some savviness in this regard, a concern for the object that is not reduced to the subject, although pursued quite differently.

It would be meaningful, I think, to revisit some of the ’sexy’ elements of Deleuze’s thought—the mistake many make with them may be the manner in which they eagerly seek a human, subjective face for them, entirely ignoring the way in which the model reaches out to highlight the ‘reality’ of the object—masochism not just as the relation of self and other, servant and mistress (as early Deleuze) but as an effort by the masochist to situate himself or herself among the world of objects, to speak to them in their own tongue, if you will.