Bill Rose Thorn has a nice post up responding to my theses on Dark Ontology and, in particular, my claim that being is without purpose or meaning. A couple of folks have misconstrued what I’m saying on this point, so it’s worth making a couple words of clarification. What does it mean to say that the universe is without purpose or meaning? It merely means that there’s nothing inscribed in the order of things that has a meaning, purpose, or divine. Natural disasters aren’t rewards or punishments for how peoples have lived their lives. The stars have nothing to say about the destinies of peoples. History is not working towards some final goal. There isn’t a battle between good and evil. No divine being was trying to teach you a lesson when you lost a loved one or got cancer. These are all just things that happen. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no grand drama of being where humans are at the center and where some struggle between the supernatural forces of good and evil are playing themselves out. Humans happened as a result of random mutation and natural selection. Nothing more. We could have just as easily not happened and at some point we’ll evolve into another species that might be far more enlightened or far more brutal than us, or we’ll just disappear from the world altogether as a result of extinction.
What doesn’t it mean to say the universe is without meaning, design, or purpose? Obviously it doesn’t mean that humans and other critters don’t create meaning. We’re up to our eyeballs in meaning every minute of our lives. When I use a hammer to pound nails I’ve assigned a purpose to it and given it a meaning. When a person reflects on the significance of their cancer for their lives, they’re giving it meaning. We set all sorts of goals for ourselves. We wonder about the significance of Hurricane Katrina for culture. We wonder what the impact of 9-11 will be on society. We write novels and philosophies. In everything we do we do so in a world of meaning. 
The thesis of naturalism and nihilism is not that there isn’t meaning. It’s a thesis about where meaning comes from. The naturalistic thesis is that meaning arises from the play of the signifier and our embodied, lived, cognitive experiences. It’s the thesis that they aren’t in the things themselves. When my daughter sees ponies in the clouds, they’re not in the things themselves. We can only talk about the world meaningfully, but one of the neat things about meaning is that it can talk about the non-meaningfulness of existence itself. Obviously a person’s cancer means a lot to them, but in the order of nature itself independent of their cognition, relation to language, and so on, there’s no meaning to their cancer in the sense of some metaphysically inscribed purpose, plan, or meaning to that cancer. Nope. They just suffered a sad genetic mutation as a result of some substance like uranium they were exposed to. It wasn’t some divine being teaching them a lesson or placing them in some dire straits for some grand cosmic plan. What I’m saying is no different than anything Spinoza or the Stoics said: nothing in itself is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, purposeful or purposeless, only our evaluations make it so. Good/bad, right/wrong, and all the rest are purely relational predicates. My cats seem to take great delight in resting their little heads in my stinky shoes. Me not so much. Is the shoe’s odor loathsome? Apparently not to my cat. It’s my cat that gives value to that odor. It’s value isn’t in the shoe itself.
Larval Subjects . 
May 16, 2013 at 12:52 am
Levi,
I’d have to agree with you that the world itself is without meaning and it is only we who imbue it with this or that significance in our interactions with particular things within it. I think along with Spinoza that there is a mode of bodies and their affections in relationship with other bodies separate from the mode of ideas in the mind – the source of meaning. These modes or planes must not be confused. What I am trying to think through is upon reaching this nihilistic conclusion, where only negation follows from any belief in *the world, we are still left with actions on the earth and theoretical prejudices guiding them. Though in different modes or planes, what we say and do with only a strictly social setting can reverberate with consequences for material bodies – on the planet.
The wealth of negativity required to keep these planes separate can lead into the black hole of absolute meaninglessness if subjective assertion and objective indifference are held apart steadfastly. An intertwining or ‘resonance’ between the social mind and the material bodies is accomplished well by Spinoza and taken in exciting directions by Deleuze and Guattari. Thinking especially of Nietzsche and Philosophy where Deleuze explicitly deals with the problem of nihilism as one desire among many while being cut off, internalized, and resentful.
May 16, 2013 at 1:56 am
You say: “The reason I don’t reject the idea that there’s meaning is because it’s false. There’s plenty of meaning. We give meaning to all sorts of things. My point is that meaning arises from us and critters like us, it’s not inscribed in the fabric of reality itself. We create purposes for ourselves, give significance to things, and all the rest.”
Yet, in your first axiom you state matter-of-fact:
“There is no meaning to existence or anything in the universe. Life is an accident and has no divine significance (though it’s obviously important to the living).”
In proving that existence and the universe are without meaning and purpose you have had to assume that one part of reality – namely that humans give significance (meaning) to things – was full of sense, meaning, and purpose (even if it was humans themselves that create this meaning, sense, and purpose). If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
You have reduced meaning to the human animal as the incarnation/creator of significance in the universe.
May 16, 2013 at 2:30 am
I suspect that dolphins and corporations create meaning as well.
May 16, 2013 at 2:48 am
Haha…. a stand up comedian of ideas! Of course with that logic and satire, who needs meaning or axioms to begin with. :)
May 16, 2013 at 2:56 am
Noir,
Pardon me? The point is simply that meaning is a relational property that requires sentient beings of some sort (dolphins, powerful computers, corporations, zebras, humans, whatever). It doesn’t reside in the things themselves. My response was in earnest. I don’t think all entities relate to the world meaningfully, nor do I think meaning is something that only humans are capable of producing. When those sentient beings are gone, however, so is meaning. A dollar bill in the absence of humans is just paper and ink. Why is this comedic? Perhaps it would help if you stated your view on meaning.
May 16, 2013 at 3:52 am
I don’t have a view on meaning, Levi. Remember I’m the semantic nihilist in the equation. In that sense I still root myself in Frege and others of that ilk. Meaning just doesn’t matter. I accept the dictum that there is neither objective nor subjective meaning in the universe. Meaning is a way of organizing local experience, of making sense of the sense datum of existence at a particular moment and place. Meaning is relative, there is no absolute knowledge; only local variants thereof. Stable linguistic habits do not preclude this. For the most part natural language is semantically indeterminate. Semantic nihilism goes much further: no sentences containing vague terms are either
true or false, not even sentences that do not concern borderline cases. I agree with Feyerbend: anything goes.
May 16, 2013 at 9:16 am
It seems to me that another way to state the point would be:
1. There is only meaning in relation to sentience.
2. There is no uber-sentience (no God, no universal spirit); sentience only exists in specific, finite, historical creatures.
3. Therefore, meaning is specific, finite, fabricated, historical – not universal, overarching or pre-given.
I find this unobjectionable. I’m not sure what noir is getting at, although perhaps Levi’s first axiom is a little too sweeping.
May 16, 2013 at 9:54 am
yes, that’s the question – as in monty python ‘what do you mean by mean’ – if we mean ‘sense’ or purposeful direction, then all sorts of activities and objects have it – embryos, nest making, and I wont even mention mention real unities in absolute survey….
May 16, 2013 at 11:11 am
Hi Levi – Thanks for the above reply about meaning. I am in total agreement. But it would seem, then, that axiom 34 needs to go. Aren’t the notions of ‘harmony’ and ‘disharmony’ (or ‘chaos’?) merely human constructs that merely reflect our relative taste for some phenomenon – how these things seem to affect our human project? Nature doesn’t care about harmony, as you point out above. Or is there a difference between meaning and harmony? Harmony seems to be a certain kind of meaning – one more dangerous because it seems more ‘intrinsic’ to the phenomena. The rain on the windshield can cause me irritation, thinking I’ll be wet when I step out of the car, or delight as I look at the ‘beauty’ of the steaming rivulets. But in both cases it’s an affect based on my immediate emotional state, underwritten by the syntonic sense of ‘what it means for me.’ Deeper, thoughts of the harmony or disharmony of nature are used to supply notions of good and bad in natural phenomena. The shape of a oak leaf in summer vs the turkey carcass I found in my yard yesterday, killed and eaten by coyotes. So the notion of ‘beauty’ is in here too.
In the wider (stickier) sense, beyond the nature-manmade’ or ‘organic-inorganic’ split, all is nature. Humans haven’t ‘created’ anything in a sense but merely rearranged matter to suit their immediate goals. This is not to say we can’t make judgments about good and bad manipulations of matter. The superfund site that causes sickness and disease to the inhabitants of a nearby town is a horrible reminder (as is building pipe bombs or chemical weapons) of, in fact, the manipulation of matter with the kinds of goals and purposiveness that, even if we choose to see human mind activity also as ‘nature’, we can easily see as ‘bad.’ I don’t think this is sentimental. The point is that chemical reactions, the phenomena of nature (even the chemical rearrangements in the brain that allow a decision like ‘go ahead and dump the spent material here – no one will know, it’ll save us a lot of money and hassle’) used by these purposes, are neutral to them. The phenomena are not the problem, nor the solution. They simply are. Nature is.
This leads to a further thought about the ‘nature’ of human purposiveness – what kind of chemical rearrangement causes the above reaction. If the axioms proscribe an arena where the ‘super-natural’ is disallowed, what accounts for evil? In other words, if we separate ‘purposiveness’ and ‘meaning’ from ‘nature’ haven’t we reengaged the very split that supplies purposiveness with its purpose: to act ‘on’ or ‘with’ nature, as an entity or quality that is above it, or ‘super-natural’? I am a resident of Boston, where the recent bombings caused severe injury to several friends. I do not believe the explanation lies ‘elsewhere’ than in the world. The contingent historical, social, circumstantial, phenomenological experiences that may explain how a brain can turn in its decision making potential toward making a bomb for the purpose of maiming and killing seem inadequate, external. Something more needs to be explained about that turn, about the material rearrangement leading to decision making. Frankly I am at the limit of my own understanding here, and aware that these thoughts, this writing, arose not supernaturally but here in the world, that there is a natural process taking place in me that has a seeming ‘purposiveness’ as its engine. And I am also aware that my unreflective tendency is to think of this process as external to or separate from phenomena. And yet it is clear that the words are here now in the world, in something in my brain, in the movement of my fingers on the phone keyboard, and in the interest or ‘passion’ I sense right now as I relate my thought. All I need to do is simply examine what’s happening in this moment to recognize the nature in all of it. In sum I think axiom 34 can be reduced to ‘Nature is neither harmonious or unharmonious – nature is.’ But is there a further axiom on human mental activity – its potential and limits as natural phenomena? I guess I am sensing my own real limitations in offering one. I simply don’t know. Wow, there’s the question of ‘knowing.’
Thanks, Levi again for provoking these considerations.
Warmly,
Jeff
May 16, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Devin was unable to post this comment so I’m posting it on his/her behalf:
There are a few things that need to be distinguished here. On the one hand, it’s necessary to distinguish between substances and qualities. A substance is an entity that can exist on its own, while a quality always exists either in a substance or occurs between substances. A color like red, for example, is a quality. It requires a substance in which to exist and cannot exist apart from that substance. Pointing out that qualities like red can only exist in substances doesn’t negate their reality, only their independence. My contention is that meaning is a quality, not a substance.
Second, it’s necessary to distinguish between substances and the point of view substances have on the world around them. A substance’s point of view is how it grasps other substances and qualities. My claim is that meaning arises from a substances point of view, it’s not something that inheres in the things grasped, themselves. Meaning is the way entities such as ourselves, cats, super-complex computers, government agencies, etc., grasp other things in the world around them. This doesn’t place these entities outside of existence, but is merely the recognition that these entities grasp the world in a particular way. It’s no different than recognizing that bats grasp the world through sonar while cats grasp it through vision, smell, and sound, and that sonar is in the bat, not the thing detected (the thing detected is nothing like a sonar blip).
All of this is important because we need to recognize the variability of meaning across species, people, cultures, and entities. A few years ago I was hosting some dear friends for dinner, and I was talking about how I was thinking about renting a truck to so I could rent a tiller to turn over the soil in my garden. My friend, a Chinese woman, got very excited and declared “that would be great! then you could haul some trees for us and help us plant them!” At the time I was very offended. I thought, what nerve this woman has thinking I’m going to do all this labor for them. I attributed a particular meaning to her proposal. Later I realized that she had given me a huge complement (her meaning). In asking to do this favor for her, she was proposing that our families become more tightly bound to one another, that we form obligations to one another. She was saying she wanted our families to be closer. If we treat meaning as a property of the things themselves we can’t get at this sort of variability of meaning.
May 16, 2013 at 1:42 pm
I don’t think that embryos, cell processes, organs, etc., have teleological activity. There’s no goal that’s “pulling” them along, but rather just a set of highly complex chemical processes that bottom out at particular points. This is no different than recognizing that marbles come to rest at the bottom of bowls when rolled along their sides; more complex, to be sure, but there’s no goal pulling things towards something. The only systems capable of purposiveness appear to be sentient systems that can set goals for themselves. All the rest is efficient causality.
May 16, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Noir,
This is exactly what I’m claiming:
I’m thus not sure what you’re objecting to and what claim you’re attributing to me.
May 16, 2013 at 2:00 pm
If you remember on my blog post: I was not objecting to your actual message, I was objecting to the way your were “saying it”. There is a difference. Maybe if you reread my blog post you’d realize that I even say in several places that I agreed with you to begin with. It was the phrasing in you axiom that bothered me. Sometimes you take things to heart. Sometimes you are such a literalist of the imagination. Sometimes you blow simple criticisms of your work up beyond what they need be. Sometimes you bypass the full statements of an other’s work, and seem to earmark on the points that suit your wounded pride. My whole post was in intent not to object to your message, but to help you hone in on the analytical way in which you espoused it. Whether we like it or not the American Analytical traditions do spark the need to get it right the first time. Since words make up sentences, and sentences in themselves have no actual rock solid semantic meaning then it behooves us to understand all the unconscious usages of those words that go without saying most of the time.
Remember my post was dealing only with your first Axiom, not the full panoply of axioms that evolved from that first one. In the end all I did was try to convey the message that your axiom might better be served phrased like this, or something thereof:
“Existence and the Universe have no meaning, purpose, or justification. Life has no essence or identity, but is an accident: a catastrophe without precedent.”
It was as simple as that. There was no grand objection to you Levi, unless you perceived it as such. You alone turned this into some objection, not I. I was only dealing with words. Not with meaning. Just the ordering of words and their semantic equivalents within the habitual.
May 16, 2013 at 2:15 pm
Yikes, Noir! What gives? I’m not reacting to what you’ve been saying in the way you’re suggesting at all. I’m just trying to get clear on what you’re getting at. Why all the hostility?
May 16, 2013 at 2:16 pm
hostility?
May 16, 2013 at 2:17 pm
I’d genuinely thought we were having a friendly discussion trying to figure out these very complicated issues, up to this point. I’m really surprised by this post. Is everything okay over there?
May 16, 2013 at 2:20 pm
Whoosh… you do truly read what is not there! Dang, Levi… nothing wrong on my side, how about you? You seem to take a little criticism as “hostility”. Strange! No, nothing wrong over here! Same old codger and grumpious I’ve always been… haha!
May 16, 2013 at 2:29 pm
This sounds like a very hostile thing to say and doesn’t seem reflective of the discussion we were having up to this point:
I’ve honestly just been trying to get clear on what you’re saying and didn’t take myself to be “blowing things up beyond what they need to be”. Nor did I feel any sort of wounded pride by your remarks. I thought this was a perfectly ordinary give-and-take that occurs in any discussion where two people are involved in trying to understand one another. I’m not sure why trying to figure out what you’re saying prompted this psychoanalysis of me and these observations of my character.
May 16, 2013 at 2:48 pm
Our little tit for tat is a perfect example of how sentences have no semantic meaning! You see it as hostile, I see it as frustration. Haha… let’s face it you and I see the world just a tad differently. Nothing wrong with that. Just a point of order. I have no animosity toward you, Levi. I’m not trying to make this personal. I’m the last person who would try to psychoanalyze you, Levi. Maybe best to shake virtual hands and realize we all get frustrated from time to time. I meant no offense. Ok? Frustration is a bad taskmaster… and, even the best of us let that dog out of the basket once in a while.
I extend the virtual handshake of brotherhood to you, Levi x>>>+
May 17, 2013 at 12:30 am
i know this may be a redundant question, but sometimes while i am reading your blog and other blogs with which you are affiliated, i get the feeling that some of the participants in discussions think that something radically philosophically new is being produced here and now. well, i wonder, what makes this discussion of ‘necessity vs. contigency’, ‘matter vs. “spirit”‘ etc. so different and more eye-opening than ancient disputes of the same kind since plato’s so called gigantomachia, through universalisim vs. nominalism debate in the middle ages and ’empiricism vs. rationalism’ in the early modern period, up until, well, now (except that “spirit” is today necessarily, or maybe contingently, written and spoken under quotation marks)?
May 17, 2013 at 1:36 am
You’d have to ask the folks that say such thing, golgatica.
May 17, 2013 at 2:49 am
I’m going to have to read Stengers ‘Le vierge et le neutrino’ I think it might be v. relevant!
May 17, 2013 at 10:29 am
of course that should be ‘La vierge et le neutrino’…
May 17, 2013 at 10:30 pm
‘Pourquoi faudrait-il que, simultanément, ceux qui défendent les sciences « vident » le monde de toutes les autres pratiques qui n’ont ni la même histoire ni les mêmes ambitions ? Comment, en conséquence, imaginer la possibilité d’une coexistence des pèlerins de la Vierge et des praticiens des sciences sans hiérarchie, sans un point de vue qui trie, juge et ordonne (les premiers traduiraient l’arbitraire de la subjectivité humaine, les seconds une objectivité valable pour tous les humains) ?’
‘Why is it necessary that those who defend the sciences (practices that people the world with new beings) simultaneously ’empty’ the world of all the other practices that have neither the same history nor the same ambitions? How, as a result, could one imagine the possibility of a coexistence of the pilgrims of the Virgin and the practitioners of science without hierarchy, without a point of view that screens, judges and orders (the first would express the arbitrary nature of human subjectivity, the second an objectivity valid for all humans?’
http://www.recalcitrance.com/vierge.htm
With your dogmatic adherence to the scientific status quo ‘let’s run with what science says today’ you have, as you say, disdain for all those who do not accept your assumptions….this is the truth: ‘anything that posits deep meanings, supernatural causes, purposes, and so on ought to be treated with disdain and ignored.’ (levi, aka Dawkins) :)
We initiate causal series by wanting to – and we find minds in nature. There are no mechanisms underlying “human” mindfulness, neurobiology and psychophysics encounter mindfulness as a primary fact of the universe. Current Anglo-Saxon academic culture that endorses an entirely reactive concept of minds.
but there’s always hope, you change every few years old chap.
May 19, 2013 at 4:20 am
Nevertheless, it is challenging to be free of ‘disdain’, scorn and contempt. I’m not sure I can do it! But then again, why not? Does having disdain for creationists, yogis, desmond tutu et al make the world a better place? I mean it is a valid question which kind of goes to the heart the message of Jesus…If we were actual able – which was always Gurdjieff’s challenge. We don’t know how to be Christians….or not get pissed off.
And of course the creationists are crafty….the idea that one species turns into another is still theoretical!
‘Atheists always take negative proof against a religion as positive proof for themselves, but this is both lazy and false. We see this with Darwinism, DNA, carbon dating, and so on and on. We have proved that the Earth was not created in 4004BC, so we have disproved a certain claim of certain Christians. So what? It isn’t much. We have evidence the Earth is more like 4.5 billion years old, but it is not clear how this number, even if it is totally accurate, precludes gods or creation. An Earth that was infinitely old would logically preclude gods or creation, but an Earth with a beginning yields just as well to the story of Genesis as the younger Earth. To be clear, I don’t believe in a single solitary claim of Genesis or the rest of the Bible, so do not mistake my argument. But a very old Earth does not score any points for atheists, either. Nebular models and solar disks and gravitational collapses are just as squishy and hypothetical as Genesis, and the origin of life from atoms bumping like poolballs is even more tenuous. Nor does replacing poolball mechanics with probabilities and gauge fields and tensors impress me. None of the new math has come near answering the old questions: we have simply been forbidden from asking them anymore.’
http://mileswmathis.com/atheism.html
‘Scientists will say that the current models are superior to Genesis, at any rate, since one who accepts Genesis doesn’t continue to ask how the Earth evolved. This much is true. Good scientists continue to study, while religious people and bad scientists do not. But this paper is not about good scientists, it is about bloated atheists and bad scientists, the sort that think they already know how things are.
They have barebones models of the early Earth, models less than a century old and ever-changing, and they think they can claim with certainty how things are, who exists and who does not, how things got here and where they are going. They think a theory of how things evolved is equivalent to a theory of how things were created. They think a model of a complex twisting molecule is the same as a blueprint for life or a explanation of self-locomotion or a proof of phylogeny. They think that four-vector fields and non-abelian gauge groups and statistical analysis explain existence, complexity, solidity, and change.’
But the greatest problem with evolution is contained in its name. It is a theory of evolution, not of creation or birth or incipience. It proposes a mechanism for how life changes, not how it begins. To be a variant answer to Genesis, it would have to propose a mechanism for the beginnings of life, and this it does not even pretend to do. The Earth is not infinitely old, therefore there must have been some beginning to life. Short of spores arriving from outerspace or a miraculous lightning strike, we still have no viable theory for this. We have not been able to bombard i
norganic molecules with cosmic rays or any other field that has turned it into living matter. We have not been able to build even a protozoan or a virus or an enzyme from the ground up, from atoms or elements, or to diagram how nature did it. We don’t know how the mitochondria got into the cell or why, or where they were before the cell. For all these reasons and many others, it is strictly illogical for the scientists to force evolution upon religious people as a counter-explanation to their own creation myths. Since evolution has never been an explanation of creation, evolution is not in necessary conflict with any creation theory. Creationists, although often annoying, are not preventing anyone from studying the origins of life on this planet. Their meddling with grade school textbooks in the red states is often absurd, but this has not, and could not, affect research at the graduate and post-graduate levels in the various disciplines, where it actually gets done. We are not losing large numbers of potential scientists to fundamentalist Christian families, and we may not be losing any. Science cannot force families to raise their children on accepted principles without becoming even more fascist than it already is. Biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, and geologists should simply pursue their work and leave the religious people to their own devices. Until the Christians invade the science departments, it is simply unnecessary to debate them or berate them.
May 19, 2013 at 4:26 am
‘In summation, the scientists should stick to science and the critics should stick to what they know: politics and pop culture. Richard Dawkins, for instance, has more than enough to do in filling the holes of evolution. He does not need to waste time debating charlatans and mental midgets in Kansas and Montana. The young-Earth creationist view that he has spent so much time ridiculing was not making any
headway before he came along, and if it is now finding a small foothold in the small towns, it may because he has helped publicize it. As for the atheists of all sorts and levels, scientist and layman, they should apply the same standards they apply to creationists to themselves. They should be entirely more parsimonious in their use of the words “knowledge” and “certainty”. They should recognize that their elevation above the ignorant masses is not nearly as great as they imagine, since their theories are slender reeds, not marble columns. Finally, they should recognize that atheism is a belief just as firmly planted in irrationality, in ego and desire, as theism. Atheism has no proof and no possible proof. It is unscientific. Like all human beliefs, it is a hunch based on a tissue, a guess based on a smear, a conjecture based on a passing mist.’
http://mileswmathis.com/atheism.html
this guy is a v. gifted mathematician and I recommend his site.
May 19, 2013 at 6:44 am
If there are no proofs that God or gods exist, there are also no proofs they do not exist. The atheist is just as unscientific as the theist. The atheist’s stance is just as mired in belief as the theist’s, but the atheist also claims to disdain belief. So he must disdain himself.
May 19, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Paul,
Burden of proof is always on the person making the claim. Do you feel compelled to refute the existence of Zeus or Aphrodite.
May 20, 2013 at 8:41 am
Paul:
Do you believe in a god, gods or goddesses? Why or why not?
May 20, 2013 at 9:01 am
PS: Also, this essay you link to, I couldn’t get past the point where he chides Hitchens for this statement about the Earth being a penal colony. I have never heard him ever use this argument in any of the debates he has been in with theists. In any case, it’s an odd quote. But to then use this as part of the argument that atheists believe ridiculous things too, that they are just as religious or inconsistent as creationists, that’s quite tendentious.
May 20, 2013 at 9:03 am
In fact, that entire paragraph about Hitchens, at the start of the essay, is so weak, so opportunistic, I lost respect for the writer’s viewpoint by the end of it.
May 20, 2013 at 10:51 pm
the whole issue was the question of disdain….it doesn’t matter what I ‘believe’ (I don’t do belief) – what is bizarre is an axiom calling for disdain…
May 21, 2013 at 12:05 am
Paul,
Why should we have any more regard for theories like those found in astrology or vitalism or the idea that mind is independent of brain/body or faith healing or the thesis that natural disasters are divine punishment than we have for phrenology or phlogiston? Why should these be considered reasonable positions to hold today? We even have studies now that show no correlation between prayer for others and for them healing.
May 21, 2013 at 3:47 am
you don’t have to believe in any of this – you don’t even have to accept the studies showing that a fake pill makes you feel better (placebo effect) – and we have no idea how that works! Of course we will one day….and apparently it even works when one knows it’s a placebo…
I’m not interested in arguments about god – how ridiculous to even discuss that! – but I have no desire to judge all sorts of things/practices I don’t do.
the fundamental point is live and let live….you don’t need disdain – but maybe that is a word you might change to not considering something a ‘reasonable’ position.
‘no one ought to issue vetoes to the other…we ought on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom…that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless…then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.’ I’m sure Adam Miller would agree with that.
You don’t have to ‘believe’ in anything, except perhaps the rational progress of science slowly working it all out, filling in the gaps, but your original axiom was far more general – ignore and disdain anyone/thing that believes in ‘purpose’, ‘mystical experience’ etc.,….but frankly that’s fine, disdain away..:) live and let live!!!
May 21, 2013 at 4:07 am
another way might be to say, yes, let us ‘ignore’ anything we like as ‘background noise’ – but we don’t have to actively seek to destroy it unless it engangers life in some way….
As stengers notes with the term ‘interesting’ – lots of things don’t become ‘inter-esting’ don’t force themselves between us – we don’t have to take them into account. Who cares if some choose to follow astrology, or invoke the mother goddess (starhawk,neo-pagan ‘witches’) – you don’t have to. For science things only become interesting when one either has to incorporate them or deny them as ‘unreliable’ witnesses to ‘nature’.
A few decades ago, or less, we might have sought to ignore or even choose to disdain ‘behaviourism’ – a v. influential ‘scientic’ claim…..that still is around and about.
May 21, 2013 at 7:15 am
and finally, your last comment is irrelevant. I.e., it does not address your original axiom. You are judging all these practices, and disdaining them, compared to one particular practice – that of ‘science’ – look at many of your own recent comments ‘this is best we can do’ etc. Most of these practices aren’t even claiming what ‘science’ claims, a greater and greater encounter with the reality of everything. From your position ethnopsychiatry would be pointless, and worthy of an active derision. You might not be ‘interested’ in it, but that is quite different to your scorn.
Tobie Nathan: Manifeste pour une psychopathologie scientifique.
Isabelle Stengers: Le medicin et le charlatan
http://www.decitre.fr/livres/medecins-et-sorciers-9782843241291.html
there are other therapeutic systems not reducible to our own. They are real conceptual systems not reducible to our concept of empty beliefs….unless you think freud and lacan had it all sorted – which of course you are free to do.
May 21, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Paul,
I find your comments here very peculiar:
Nothing in my position suggests that we have to reject the obvious truth that people believe different things and that this plays a role in how they encounter themselves, others, and the world about them. This is a key component of the concept of transference in psychoanalysis. Suppose you have a patient that was raised Christian fundamentalist, believes in demons and possession, and who is deeply suspicious of science believing it to be the devil’s work. It is unlikely that analysis could have much effect on such a patient because of how their transference is structured. They might do better going to an exorcist for, say, their alcoholism; not because they’re really possessed by demons, but because their transference is such that the exorcist’s words will be capable of having an impact on them whereas the psychoanalyst’s words will not.
In my view you are conflating recognition of the fact that people believe different things with issues of truth and what is real. One can simultaneously say that our Christian fundamentalist alcoholic who theorizes their addiction in terms of demonic possession is mistaken about what’s going on in them, while also recognizing that treatment has to proceed as if these beliefs were true and work within that framework when treating the patient.
You go on to say:
I suspect that your remarks here have something to do with the politics in New Zealand and the politics here in the United States. You seem to think that religion is this innocent little thing that effects no one, that is merely a set of beliefs, but here in the States it is intimately bound up with our politics. It has had a huge impact on climate policy, foreign affairs, economics, science funding, as well as the rights of women and GLBT people. These are things that endanger lives at a variety of levels and, in the case of Christianity, has done so for 1600 years. These are things that we should all be concerned about. Were it just a question of astrology, for example, I wouldn’t care very much as astrology is pretty harmless. But we’re not just talking about innocent, eccentric beliefs here, but beliefs that have very real national and international consequences.
You write,
You seem to forget that a lot of this discussion is philosophical and that in philosophical discussions we debate what is true and not true. That’s the nature of what we do as philosophers. I have put forward a set of constraints within which I think philosophical questions ought to be posed in a contemporary setting. This excludes other modes of explanation. However, that doesn’t somehow entail that outside of the philosophical setting I go about denigrating the beliefs of others or excluding them because they think differently than me. Adam Miller is a good example. He is a very good friend and colleague and I was instrumental in hiring him here at the college. I did this knowing full well the themes of his work and what he believes. While I don’t share all of his views, I admire his work and value it. The fact that I disagree with some of his claims doesn’t somehow entail that I think that work should be abolished. Rather, it means that we get to have lively discussions. What I do not find acceptable is that I or anyone else should just remain silent on these issues. These should be matters of debate like anything else and where it is suggested that the atheist should remain silent all we’re witnessing is an exercise of power on the part of religious akin to white people telling African-Americans that they should just be quiet about inequality lest they turn others against them. In other words, what you’re proposing is just a way of advancing religious privilege and hegemony, which is the way despotic power always functions against minorities.
May 22, 2013 at 8:06 am
‘In other words, what you’re proposing is just a way of advancing religious privilege and hegemony, which is the way despotic power always functions against minorities.’
that’s just absurd! You continue to ignore your original axiom which was to scorn anyone claiming purpose etc. It was that simple. You don’t have to remain silent! You have been linking your claims to ‘science’ – which is fine, but i don’t think most of the practices you scorn are making claims about truth. They are just pragmatic practices which apparently work for those people – that’s all. I don’t think Starhawk is interested in advancing religious privilege.
‘nothing in my position suggests that we have to reject the obvious truth that people believe different things and that this plays a role in how they encounter themselves, others, and the world about them.’
No, you don’t reject that truth, you simply think that anyone who believes in ‘purpose’ should be disdained. It’s not that hard is it?
I respect your remarks about religion in the usa. I think that’s the issue.
Btw, I’m not convinced that philosophers debate what is true and what is not true – I thought that was left to a certain kind of science claiming to act as reliable witnesses – and certainly not to lawyers. Do you think Deleuze was interested in what was true, representation. I think he thought it was kind of boring.
I respect what you say here, but your axiom, and that was all, is itself ‘despotic’. But you are incapable of retracting it.
‘anything that posits deep meanings, supernatural causes, purposes, and so on ought to be treated with disdain and ignored.’
You don’t see tha being a tad extreme – of course not. But please don’t tell me that I have forgotten what philosophy is – it’s just not your version, relating everything to what is ‘true’. OMG.
May 22, 2013 at 4:12 pm
Paul,
No, I don’t think that’s extreme. I don’t think such things are credible beliefs and that they should be taken seriously. That’s all I meant by disdain. Additionally I think science is a far more reliable witness than anything else than we’ve devised. Finally, Deleuze follows Bergson in attempting to provide a metaphysics proper to science. His ontology is thoroughly naturalist, cf. his essay on Lucretius in LoS.
May 23, 2013 at 7:29 am
ok, thanks for that. i would like to write more about ‘belief’ and ethnopsychiatry. Because I think it might be worth while. The idea that some people have beliefs and we think and know….the truth
I will look at the essay on Lucretius!
But I don’t think we have to wait until science tells us what ‘matter’ is – so as to ultimately ground a ‘nihilist materialism’ – that cannot possibly account for many things – including the quite rational possibility that psyches can exist without a brain – because they didn’t emerge from it.
You might even find Tobie nathan’s ‘manifesto for a scientific psychopathology’ interesting. It’s not about recognising that people have different beliefs….i.e magical or infantile thought (a la freud)….\one can easily do without the conceptual couple belief/thought.- they believe, we know….
The thinking head of humanity.
there is a conf this summer in paris with Nathan and Stengers – I’m sure it would be inter-esting….
May 23, 2013 at 7:29 am
and I appreciate your comments, some ‘professors’ are far to busy ;)
May 31, 2013 at 1:10 am
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