Philosophy Out of the Box

February 27, 2010

Beyond the Stars

Filed under: New Media, Society — profgiles @ 4:24 pm

Partly human nature, but mostly a product of corporate media, we are bombarded with the message that we should be obsessed with stars – sports stars, movie stars, celebrities. There is a something to be said for celebrating excellence, after all, being the best we can be is something to which we should all aspire. But our corporate media focuses on the stars to the exclusion of all others. This is very evident in the coverage of the Olympic Games.

As always, the U.S. corporate media before the Games anointed several athletes as special and focused on them to an almost nauseating degree. If I had a dollar for every time Apolo Ono’s cheesy goatee was thrust into my field of vision I could fund the U.S. Olympic team. Even when the Golden Boy was disqualified in one of his races for cheating the corporate media’s sycophantic obsession with him did not diminish one bit. I understand that this is a by-product of the real obsession of the corporate media – making money – and the need to manufacture stars to then be exploited by corporations to sell products, but that doesn’t mean I have to play along.

Something within my nature always wants to root for the underdog. I have interest not just in the winners but also in the losers. I don’t want to just see Bode Miller, I want to see others. If you are fortunate enough to be at the Olympic Games then you get to witness not just the preordained stars, you get to witness the performance of every athlete who competes. That is the true spirit of the Olympic Games – an open competition where everyone gets an equal opportunity to compete and shine. We should celebrate the winners, absolutely, but we should also celebrate everyone who competes.

Fortunately, the Internet, the great leveler, allows us to do that. On NBC’s Olympic Web site, they post results and video of almost every athlete’s competition. I had a great deal of fun on the Men’s Giant Slalom Results page where I could watch all of those athletes who were ignored by the corporate media: the skiers from India, Iran, Peru, Argentina, and other countries large and small who are there to compete in the spirit of the Games not to hawk cold medicine or fast food. You can similarly see most of the athletes in all of the sports. Yes Kim Yu-Na gave a beautiful performance, but so did Turkey’s Tugba Karademir – she finished last in the competition, but I admire her for trying. (Figure skating has long been judged more on expectations and star power than performance anyway).

The Olympic Games and their television coverage are only symptoms of a larger issue in human nature. We are overly obsessed with the stars in all fields. If someone is famous or successful we make the mistake of thinking that they are admirable and superior human beings in all aspects. We need look no further than Tiger Woods to see that this is a false view. And yet, why does the corporate media obsess over his personal life? Why should a rich person or a movie star be “interesting” simply because they are a celebrity? It is a truly frightening realization that our society is encouraging people to try and emulate these “stars.” Shows like Access Hollywood and TMZ are a sign of what can only be called a sickness.

But I slightly digress. While I reject the insipid notion that everyone who participates gets a trophy, I also reject the opposite extreme that only the winners are worthy of attention. Most importantly, I reject the corporate media machine that manufactures celebrity, reducing human beings to commodities for consumption. That game is not worth playing.

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February 21, 2010

Defending Nietzsche Contra Žižek

Filed under: Contemporary Sophism — Tags: Nietzsche, Žižek — profgiles @ 10:47 pm

Slavoj Žižek claimed:

“Is it not too simple to relieve Nietzsche of responsibility by claiming that the Nazis distorted his thought? Of course they did, but so did Stalinism distort Marx, so was every theory changed (betrayed) in its practico-political application, and a Hegelian point to be made here is that, in such cases, the “truth” is not simply on the side of theory. What if the attempt to actualize a theory renders visible the objective content of this theory, concealed from the gaze of the theorist himself?” – Slavoj Žižek, “Intellectuals, Not Gadflies”, 2008

I respond:
While it is true that many philosophers don’t foresee all of the ways their ideas can be used, I think Žižek is way off base implying that there is a secret fascism in Nietzsche of which even Nietzsche was unaware.

A totalitarian is a political sociopath and thus will do whatever is needed to retain power. The Nazis and the Soviets used a wide range of cultural and intellectual references for propaganda purposes. In the case of the Nazis, there was basically nothing German (as long as it wasn’t also Jewish) that they did not distort to justify their ideology. Saying that the Nazis exploited some latent fascism of Nietzsche’s philosophy is as silly as claiming Strauss wasn’t aware of the secret fascist undertones of his waltzes because Hitler played Strauss at official state functions.

Also, it should be noted that Nietzsche was quite clear about his anti-totalitarian views and made it equally clear that the Übermensch had zero fascist tendencies. Nietzsche’s letters even more than his books show someone who was deeply opposed to all forms of totalitarianism. So, I find Žižek’s comment baseless. It is paranoia, not philosophy, to see fascism lurking behind everything.

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January 26, 2010

Kepler Destroys the Universe

Filed under: Philosophy at-large — profgiles @ 10:49 am

It is almost impossible for us today to imagine the profound effect of Kepler’s theory of planetary motion (published in 1609). It was always an unquestioned assumption that everything in the heavens was pristine and perfect and that meant that the motion of heavenly bodies was circular. The paradigm of circular motion was so strong that it even tolerated the complicated theory of multiple epicycles – better to have dozens of more circles in heaven than no circles at all.

Ironically, it was Kepler who made the heavens more elegant and simpler by making the profound paradigm shift of imagining the planetary orbits as elliptical rather than circular. His system was so much more elegant than Copernicus’s. Suddenly no epicycles were needed and each planet moved in a single motion. However, it meant that God did not use perfect geometry in the Creation.

That shift in thinking, coupled with scientific work from many others, affected how intellectuals viewed their universe. If perfection was not the model for creation then the universe is a very different place. If we can’t argue from rational first principles to reality, but instead reality tells us something that violated our assumptions, then we have to change how we approach the universe. Knowledge had to be won by searching, not by reasoning to it.

Not that this changed everyone’s views. Spinoza, Leibniz still believed that truth was known through analytical logic and Hobbes still demanded that science proceed from first principles rather than observations. Even Kepler later tried to save a pristine geometrical model of the heavens by attempting to craft a solar system where the planetary orbits expressed perfect geometrical shapes, despite their imperfect ellipses.

Regardless, after Kepler, the perfect Ptolemaic universe was destroyed forever.

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January 16, 2010

Spinoza’s Proposition 1.5

Filed under: Metaphysics, Spinoza — profgiles @ 3:55 pm

Many students have trouble understanding Spinoza’s Proposition 1.5 and exactly what it is he is trying to prove. Here is what Spinoza said:

In Nature there cannot be two or more substances having the same nature or attribute.
If there were two or more distinct substances, they would have to be distinguished from one another by a difference either •in their attributes or •in their states (by Prop. 4). If they are distinguished only by a difference in their attributes, then any given attribute can be possessed by only one of them. Suppose, then, that they are distinguished by a difference in their states. But a substance is prior in nature to its states (by Prop. 1), so we can set the states aside and consider the substance in itself; and then there is nothing left through which one substance can be conceived as distinguished from another, which by Prop. 4 amounts to saying that we don’t have two or more substances ·with a single attribute·, but only one.

I think how you have to read it is to add the unspoken premise that even two distinct objects that in every other way are identical in their attributes would still be distinguishable by their different locations in space (That was Thomas Aquinas’s argument of individuation) and thus they can’t really have exactly the same attributes. So in that vein, if someone said “I have two apples, they are exactly alike in every attribute even the attribute of their location” that is really a metaphysical nonsense statement because we would not be able to discern any difference between these supposedly different apples and the speaker would be postulating imaginary entities.

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January 9, 2010

Descartes’ Circle Debunked

Filed under: Descartes — profgiles @ 4:22 pm

Almost since Descartes published his book Meditations he has been accused of committing a fallacy of circular reasoning with his argument that God is the guarantor of the truth of our belief in an external world. Descartes’ argument has ever since been derided as the “Cartesian Circle.”

The accusation is that Descartes’ asserts that the existence of God verifies that ideas that are clear and distinct must be true. So those who argue the “Cartesian Circle” position are claiming that Descartes is arguing the following:

As the Encyclopedia Britannica states it (I think a reasonable summation of the standard interpretation of the Cartesian Circle):

But Descartes cannot know that this proof does not contain an error unless he assumes that his clear and distinct perception of the steps of his reasoning guarantees that the proof is correct. Thus the criterion of clear and distinct perception depends on the assumption that God exists, which in turn depends on the criterion of clear and distinct perception.

This is a valid assessment of the argument stated above. The question though is whether that is an accurate portrayal of Descartes’ actual argument.

Garret Thomson in Bacon to Kant argues that it is not. The key to understanding Descartes’ argument is to discern the difference between particular experiences and the whole of experience.

Descartes uses the proposition “Ideas that are clear and distinct must be true” as his foundational principle. All else follows from that. The proposition is true independent of God. Any idea that can be said to be clear and distinct then must be accepted as true. The existence of God is not a “that X” proposition, it is a clear and distinct idea, God cannot be doubted. The existence of God does not support the proposition “Ideas that are clear and distinct must be true” it guarantees that our sensory perception is trustworthy, or as Thomson puts it on p. 35, “God is introduced to meet our general systematic doubts.” We can, as Descartes points out, doubt that the external world exists; we could be deceived. God ensures that we are not deceived because God is not a deceiver.

So, Descartes’ reasoning goes like this:

Descartes is not saying that he cannot be mistaken about particular propositions such as “that X” because he knows his will can overreach and lead him to error. But because he knows he is a mind and because he knows God would not let him be deceived, then knowledge from experience is possible. Thus, if he can reason correctly (his four rules of scientific method) then his mind is incapable of error because he can arrive at clear and distinct ideas.

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