Posted by Shotter on Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:58 | #

A sample of John Shotter’s concerns:

Currently, I am re-reading William James’ A Pluralistic Universe, and his comments on Henri Bergon’s style of writing brought my earlier making these distinctions to mind. He noted that: “If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like Bergson’s1. A ‘straightforward’ style, an american reviewer lately called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements of one’s body. The lucidity of Bergson’s way of putting things is what all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real magician” (p.227, my italics).

I first encountered the claim that our expressions, in the course of their unfolding, needed to fit or to follow in their expression, somehow, the contours of the circumstances of their expression, in Vico’s On the Study Methods of our Time (an oration given in 1708 and published in 1709). In it he pointed out that it is “... impossible to assess human affairs by the inflexible standard of abstract right; we must rather gauge them by the pliant Lesbic rule1, which does not conform bodies to itself, but adjusts itself to their contours” (Vico, 1709/1965, p.34). I later found that Aristotle (1955) in The Nicomachean Ethics had used the same metaphor: “...  there are some cases that no law can be framed to cover, so that they require a special ordinance. An irregular object has a rule of irregular shape, like the leaden rule of Lesbian architecture: just as this rule is not rigid but is adapted to the shape of the stone, so the ordinance is framed to fit the circumstances” (1137b30-32, p.200).

The point here is that we do not live our lives in terms of our intellectualizations of it; they are secondary; serving the practical purpose — we hope — “ ... of enabling us to make short cuts through experience and thereby to save time” (p.252). We must live out lives from within the think of it — we thin it out at our peril.

Merleau-Ponty (1970) too makes a similar point in discussing Proust’s writing: “What has been called Proust’s Platonism,” he says, “is an attempt at an integral expression of the perceived or lived world. For this reason, the writer’s work is a work of language rather than of ‘thought’. Its task is to produce a system of signs whose internal articulation reproduces the contours of experience; the reliefs and sweeping lines of these contours in turn generate a syntax in depth, a mode of composition and recital which breaks the mold of the world and everyday language and refashions it ... Thus literary speech expresses the world insofar as it has been given to someone to live it and at the same time it absorbs the world and poses itself as its proper goal. Proust was right, therefore, when he stressed that speech or writing could become a manner of living” (pp.25-26, my italics).

Indeed, T.E. Hulme (1949), the English critic and poet, remarks: “The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise — that which is common to you, me and everybody..

http://www.johnshotter.com/2014/11/29/the-importance-of-how-we-word-expressions-of-our-experiences-creating-an-unfolding-movement-of-feeling-2/

Posted by J.B. on Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:46 | #

J.B. Campbell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7CeXwBGjnw

Posted by NotSameVsUnequal on Sun, 04 Jan 2015 09:24 | #

Notice that Fredrick and Henrik use terms of “people not being the same” rather than “unequal” in this discussion.

That probably comes from my argument as such (that it is important to talk in terms of people not being the same, different and incommensurate rather than unequal) and I commend it. Very good. Congratulations.

Fredrick Andersson on immigration in Sweden

http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2015/01/RIR-150102.php

Posted by Hermeneutic on Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:58 | #

Shotter on hermeneutics:

Hermeneutical unities and the forming of inner “plumb-lines” and “compasses’:

From way back (Shotter, 1975), I worried about Academic Psychology, as ‘Natural Science of Behaviour’, for ignoring our ethical relations to one another, and I tried to outline its nature as a Moral Science of Action. I was prompted to do this, as the urge towards to obtaining wholly ‘objective’ results ‘out there’ in the external world, in which we were merely ‘observers’, simply struck me as ‘not right’; to create a one-size-fits-all society populated by people-in-general was not my intention in taking up the study of Psychology; my concern was with how we became this, that or some other kind of person, and with how we came to be autonomous individuals able to be accountable for ourselves. And in recent times I have begun to mediate upon the source of these feelings of ‘disquiet’, and upon ‘how’ or ‘from where’ such feelings of ‘not rightness’ might emerge within us. They are very deeply entrenched not only within us, but also in other animals (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg) as immediate, basic responses to inequality and unfairness; but the question remains as to how this basic sense of ‘not-rightness’ comes to be felt in this, that, or some other sphere of activity.

.......

**********
Continuing with that article’s bottom line..

Imitated, isolated, mutually exclusive words can, as signs, stand for things, but as such, they can never function as a means for navigating oneself intelligibly in a world in common with others. It is the hermeneutical ‘locating’ of an indeterminate, but nonetheless specific “living pulsation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 215) of our bodies within a whole organized web of internally related other such pulsations, that can give them their specific meaning, in a specific circumstance. In the inner “theatre” provided by such a hermeneutical understanding, “each part of the whole is ‘sensitive’ to what happens in all the others, and ‘knows them dynamically’” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 215); “as he [or she] grows in to it,” Gadamer (2000) adds, “it introduces [her or] him to a particular orientation and relationship to the world as well” (p. 443) — a particular orientation and relationship to the world, appropriate to the worded situation we are currently occupying.

**********

We have here, then, an example of the emergence within someone, not only of an “inner landscape” of related places to go in one’s efforts at relating to others in attempts to achieve one’s own projects, but also of a capacity to sense how those others will react to our efforts. And to go further, if we and others — by us all taking to the trouble to explore a whole range of experiences can come to internalize a similar hermeneutical unities within ourselves, thus to be able to act in relation to the structure of anticipations they can arouse within us — then we can all come to coordinate our activities in the realization of common projects. But does this give rise to a sense of rightness within us?

Descartes (1968), in despair at the lack of any such agreed ways of ‘going on’, decided to start again from scratch, and in his Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1637, proposed to conduct all his reasoning as if he was doing geometry — for he saw that there, there were some basic certainties: “Thus, for example, I very well perceived that, supposing a triangle to be given, its three angles must be equal to two right angles, but I saw nothing, for all that, which assured me that any such triangle existed in the world; whereas, reverting to the examination of the idea I had of a perfect Being, I found that existence was comprised in the idea in the same way that the equality of the three angles of a triangle to two right angles is comprised in the idea of a triangle or, as in the idea of a sphere, the fact that all its parts are equidistant from its centre, or even more obviously so; and that consequently it is at least as certain that God, this perfect Being, is, or exists, as any geometric demonstration can be” (pp.56-57). And he felt able to go on from this to say: “... as far as all the opinions I had accepted hitherto were concerned, I could do not better than undertake once and for all to be rid of them in order to replace them afterwards by better ones, or even by the same, once I had adjusted them by the plumb-linei of reason” (p.37) — given that, the kind of reasoning involved here was of a ‘calculational’ kind based in identities of objective shapes, forms, or patterns.

And this kind of objective truth or formal truth seems to have provided us with our sense of rightness for the last few hundred years — how could we be doing wrong if we were seeking “the truth”?

**********

Sensing gravitational fields, magnetic Norths, inner compasses: But the disquiets, among some, remained. Unintended consequences, collateral damage, the failure after failure of well-meaning projects (Scott, 2002), has aroused to need to re-think the nature of “reasoned truths.” Where might we look for hints of an alternative?

Fleck (1979) suggests that: “The problem of how a ‘true’ finding can arise from false assumptions, from vague first experiments, and from many errors and detours, can be clarified by a comparison. How does it come about that all rivers finally reach the sea, in spite of perhaps initial flowing in a wrong direction, taking roundabout ways, and generally meandering? There is no such thing as the sea as such. The area at the lowest level, the area where the waters actually collect, is merely called the sea! Provided enough water flows in the river and a field of gravity exists, all rivers must finally end up at the sea. The field of gravity corresponds to the dominant and directing disposition, and water to the work of the entire thought collective. The momentary direction of each drop is not at all decisive. The [emergent] result derives from the general direction of gravity.
The genesis and development of the Wassermann reaction can be understood in a similar way. Historically it too appears as the only possible junction of the various trains of thought. The old idea about the blood and the new idea of complement fixation merge, in a convergent development with chemical ideas and with the habits they induce to create a fixed point. This in turn is the starting point for new lines everywhere developing and again joining up with ethers. Nor do the old lines remain unchanged. New junctions are produced time and again and old ones displace one another. This network in continuous fluctuation is called reality or truth” (pp.78-79).

This is a most illuminating remark: It suggest that, at the heart of a still developing practice, based in the hermeneutically-structured background coming to be embodied by all those in the “thought collective” developing its “tradition,” is something like a gravitational field providing practitioners with a ‘shaped and vectored sense’ of how to move around within it, orienting them towards its telos, toward its overall ‘end in view’(Dewey‘s and Wittgenstein’s terms).

Even if we now have no use now for “finalized, certain, fixed truths,” for “objective or calculated truths”—what we are often pleased to call “The Truth”—the fact is, we still have a use for “unfinalized, indeterminate, still open truths.” As an emergent hermeneutical unity is neither simply ‘in the thought’ of individuals, nor is it anything ‘objective’ out in the world, yet it exists as an invisible ‘real presence’ influencing the structure of intelligible actions as an “action guiding feeling of tendency” at work within individual members of a thought collective. And, as we get near to the excellence it aims at, we come to sense the possibility of a ‘yet more’

References:
Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method and Other Writings. Trans. with introduction by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Fleck, L. (1979) The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Keller, H. (1990) The Story of My Life. New York: Bantam Books.
Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London.
Shotter, J. (1975) Images of Man in Psychological Research. London: Methuen.
Shotter, J. (2005) Vygotsky and consciousness as con-scientia, as witnessable knowing along with others. Theory and Psychology, 16(1), pp.16-36.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

For full text see http://www.johnshotter.com/ - Hermeneutical unities and the forming of an inner compass

Posted by Habits on Mon, 05 Jan 2015 17:27 | #

Difficult habits can be broken by a change of environment:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/05/371894919/what-heroin-addiction-tells-us-about-changing-bad-habits

Posted by Dispossessed Elite on Mon, 05 Jan 2015 20:23 | #

The Dispossessed Elite

Kevin MacDonald · January 5, 2015

Andrew Fraser is a legal scholar who has been forced to brave the slings and arrows of outrageous anti-White attitude in his position as Professor of Public Law at Macquarie University in Sydney. His book The WASP Question is a detailed presentation of his views on the self-destruction of the once-proud group of Anglo-Saxons who colonized vast areas after departing from their native England, but who are now very much threatened by loss of power and, even more disastrously, loss of identity. The book is an attempt to answer the question why WASPs (which he describes as “a subtly, perhaps deservedly derogatory acronym coined sometime in the late Fifties to denote White Anglo-Saxon Protestants”) have failed to protect their bio-cultural interests in the contemporary world.

This is, indeed, the fundamental question of our times—true not only of WASPs, but of all Whites, although it must be said that WASPs seem to embody this pathology to a greater extent than other White groups. Fraser’s answer is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing very wide swaths of history and pre-history, evolutionary thinking, the psychology of racial differences, and academic theology. Far from being a paean to his ethnic group, the book is nothing less than “an attack on my co-ethnics, mainly the American WASPs..

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/1/5/the-dispossessed-elite

Posted by AlternativeWrong on Tue, 06 Jan 2015 10:07 | #

Alternative Right getting it Wrong:

http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2015/01/liberalism-and-low-self-esteem.html

It would seem rather that conservatism would not feel an overbearing need to prove its difference and value thereby. It would rather take for granted the inherent value of its group and with that, its individuals, salient contributions motivated and emanating from the wish to conserve, foster and advance that social capital, one’s personal enjoyment coinciding with that common interest.

Where Sean seems to be going wrong in his definition of liberalism is in making the unit of conservation “the individual” and its capacity to maximize itself, or in conserving rules of competition. In either case, that would be liberalism contra group interests.

On another matter over there, this clip posted by Liddell is really funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvpbW7JRu0Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvpbW7JRu0Q

Posted by Johnson on Might is Right on Tue, 20 Jan 2015 08:40 | #

Might & Right - Greg Johnson

Full essay at Counter-Currents:

http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/might-and-right/#more-52628 Might and Right

A reader has asked me for my thoughts on the relationship between might and rights. (By the way, I am happy to entertain philosophical questions.)

What are rights? Rights are principles defining political freedoms and obligations. If rights are political, what makes rights “natural” as opposed to conventional? What makes rights natural is an argument deriving them from human nature. Thus natural rights are socially instituted, protected, and enforced freedoms and obligations that are rationally grounded in nature, not just arbitrarily created like the rules of football or hopscotch.

The standard straw man argument against natural rights is to assert that they are some sort of occult power that in and of themselves protect us against violence. I call this the “Ghost Shirt” view of rights, after the magical shirts of the Sioux Indians that were supposed to render them bulletproof but didn’t.

Of course rights can protect us even if we lack the power to force others to respect them, but only if we are dealing with people who share common values and are open to moral suasion. But natural rights advocates all recognize that when dealing with criminals and barbarians, we need to use force to put them down.

Tough guys like to set up the Ghost Shirt straw man, which they then “refute” with a punch in the nose. Then they claim that if rights are conventional, not natural, the man with the biggest muscles will tell us what our rights are, indeed what is right in general. This is the view that “might makes right.”

The best argument against this position is offered by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, book I, if might makes right, then right is determined not by strong individuals but by the masses of weak men, who, by banding together, become stronger than the strongest man on his own.

..... In short, natural rights might not render us bullet proof, but neither does physical strength.

....if might really makes right, then many average men united together are better entitled to rule than the superlatively strong individual. This implies that they should reject the idea that might makes right and search for a better account of the qualities that entitle the best men to rule.

Full essay at Counter-Currents:

http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/might-and-right/#more-52628 Might and Right