Tag Archives: Wittgenstein

A Wittgensteinian way with paradoxes

Posted by on November 12, 2012 9 comments

My new book, ‘A Wittgensteinian way with paradoxes’, out today https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739168967, is an attempt to look at why and how philosophers, including oneself – and using the word “philosophers” in the broadest sense possible, to refer to anyone who is doing philosophy, whether or no they know it – get stuck in paradoxes, how they can be helped to get unstuck, and how, once philosophers’ paradoxes are dissolved, the actual power of paradox to help our thinking and acting and our reconciliation to the peculiarities of our life-world, can start to be unleashed. Paradoxes often indicate an a poria in our thinking, a hovering, a nonsensical desire to say things that are uncotenable. But not always. If we get clearer about when they (/we)do, then we can start to get clearer about when they don’t, or needn’t.

Let me sketch briefly here my latest thoughts (since even the book went to press, six months ago) on what the book concerns and hopes to accomplish, by focussing in on a few of the key chapters.

In Chapter 1 of the book, I offer a radically revisionist take on ‘Logicism’, the view, often wrongly ascribed to the early Wittgenstein, that arithmetic can be derived from logic. I seek to defuse Russell’s paradox, by arguing that it doesn’t have to be seen as undermining Frege’s system, provided that one takes that system in a way different from the way that Frege himself inclined to taking it. I use Frege’s own arguments against Kerry to undermine the felt-necessity of that inclination.

Consider in this context the following wonderful passage from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the foundations of mathematics:

“Is there such a thing…as the right logical calculus, only without the contradictions?
Could it be said, e.g., that while Russell’s Theory of Types avoids the contradiction, still Russell’s calculus is not THE universal logical calculus but perhaps an artificially restricted, mutilated one? Could it be said that the pure, universal logical calculus has yet to be found? //
…The formalization of logic did not work out satisfactorily. But what was the attempt
made for at all? (What was it useful for?) Did not this need, and the idea that it must be capable of satisfaction, arise from a lack of clarity in another place?
The question “what was it useful for?” was a quite essential question. For the calculus was not invented for some practical purpose, but in order ‘to give arithmetic a foundation’. But who says that arithmetic is logic, or what has to be done with logic to make it in some sense into a substructure for arithmetic? If we had e.g. been led to attempt this by aesthetic considerations, who says that it can succeed? (Who says that this English poem can be translated into German to our satisfaction?!) (Even if it is clear that there is in some sense a translation of any English sentence into German.)”

Chapter 2 brings up to date my thoughts on the paradoxes of time-travel, explored here on an earlier occasion: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=3239; thanks to those who commented then, for strengthening my thinking on this topic.

Chapter 3 of the book, I take on the philosophical linguistics of Noam Chomsky. After first allowing certain of Chomsky’s insights into Wittgensteinian philosophy, and his appropriate scepticism as to human science – take for instance this lovely quote from him, which I have just discovered today: “As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice arise, human science is at a loss.” – I then criticise Chomsky on the grounds, roughly, that he doesn’t in my view adequately see the sense in which (as argued for instance in my THE NEW WITTGENSTEIN) there cannot be any such thing as having an external point of view on language.

Towards the end of the book, having addressed and defused various ‘philosophers paradoxes’, I look towards possible and actual ways in which paradoxes can be positively beneficial, and in which their continuing need not be conceived of by philosophers as something needing rectifying or eliminating. For example, consider the (itself somewhat paradoxical) category of ‘fictitious history’. This category is crucial to understanding what the latter Wittgenstein is quite often up to. Through offering us fictitious histories, Wittgenstein frees our minds from constriction by unwitting and/or dogmatic assumptions that imprison us. He offers us alternative possibilities (as the later Gordon Baker, in particular, stressed). Now think in this connection of what Nietzsche does in a book like The genealogy of morality (the subject, alongside Wittgenstein, of chapter 10 of my book). What is it that he does (especially in the second essay of the Genealogy) but offer a potentially-fictitious history of punishment and of morality? The point isn’t whether his account is true or not; the point is that something like it might be true; and that punctures our complacency in morality as we have inherited it. This then frees us up for the amazing and beautifully-paradoxical operation that Nietzsche undertakes in the third essay of the Genealogy: destroying ‘ascetic’ morality from within.

The last lines of the book should give you a flavour of my overall purpose in it:

“I hope this book might help play some role in the search for a truer intellectual freedom. An intellectual freedom genuinely at home in our thoroughly social and embodied nature. In our lives that are so empty of what philosophers typically call ‘paradoxes’ – and yet nonetheless, sometimes, so full of paradox.”

If readers of this blog get to read the book, I would love to know what they (you) think of it.

St Peter’s toes

Posted by on September 9, 2012 38 comments

This summer I visited Rome for the first time. Like most visitors to the city I was keen to anchor my diffuse knowledge of ancient Rome by actually seeing the actual, real remains of the old city. I wanted a direct encounter that book learning could not give me. But as I wandered around the Colosseum and the imperial fora I was disappointed. Although the ruins were so stunningly numerous and rich, so generous in the detail they provided to the onlooker, I didn’t (of course!) find the real ancient Rome there. It seemed to me that it was more convincingly present in books that I had read. And indeed it seemed that “the real Rome” was doomed to be always elsewhere: when I am reading about it, I can imagine it lurking in fallen buildings, and when I finally get to see the fallen buildings, it runs coquettishly away back into the books.  Freud reports a feeling of “derealisation” on seeing the Acropolis, and although he gives his own very characteristic Freudian explanation for this, invoking his personal biography, I suspect that his feeling was very much like mine, and that the kind of disappointment I felt is not at all uncommon.

My disappointment was inevitable because my desire to encounter “the real thing” was inchoate and absurd. Apart from anything else, I was making the physical a kind of talisman for the real. I wanted a broken marble column to present the reality of a lost civilisation to me with an immediacy that a sentence from Pliny, say, can make us yearn for but cannot itself supply. That is a lot to expect from stone.

However ill-defined it might be, this quest for “the real” is pervasive. Tourists are notorious for it. At its most discreditable, it is the quest for the real, authentic culture and traditions of a region, a demand which is profitably supplied by the provision of ersatz, commercially generated resemblances.  But that particular anthropological quest is just one example of something more generic. What we are often trying to get hold of when we travel is “the real” itself. This imperative is made clear when we see tourists crowding around, say, Michelangelo’s Pieta, which can be barely glimpsed beyond its barriers and behind its bulletproof glass. I assume that excellent reproductions afford much better opportunities to explore it. But we want the real thing. The ancient Colosseum, too, can perhaps be better glimpsed in the CGI reconstructions of it that graced the film Gladiator. But we want the real thing.

How do we feel when we confront all this actuality? We are often frustrated. Looking is not enough. We want to have some satisfyingly full experience of the object in question. One of the things we want is to understand it, and looking at just a few of the synonyms for understanding gives a vivid insight into our anxious appetite for the real. To understand something is to comprehend it, and  the archaic meaning of “comprehend,” – “to take together, to unite; include; seize” – meshes nicely with modern idioms: when looking at something with understanding, we “absorb” it; we “take it in.” We want to have it within us. Tourists taking photograph after photograph seem to be anxiously seeking and failing to reassure themselves that they have absorbed into themselves and now truly possess some iconic bit of reality. Just looking thoughtfully at an object has not given them what they need, so they apprehend it in a purely mechanical way, perhaps with some hope that future looking, at the acquired image, will provide the assimilation that has thus far eluded them.

I didn’t bring a camera on holiday with me, so my own attempts to master a sense of separation from the real involved touching. Where signs did not forbid it, I put my hands on things of beauty or interest that I saw in an attempt to “grasp” them – to experience them more fully, to register my encounter with them more securely.

And that brings me to St Peter’s toes. In St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, there is a bronze statue of St Peter, at least 700 years old, possibly much older. He is shown giving a blessing and holding the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Several of his toes have been worn to flatness by pilgrims over the centuries touching (and kissing) the statue. Pilgrims were the tourists of their day and they are numerous among today’s tourists in Rome. It is interesting to consider the possibility that pilgrims and (other) tourists have a motivation in common. Both groups are seeking a satisfying encounter with “the real.” You could argue that pilgrims are lucky, because they have a relatively clear idea of what this yearned-for absolute is: it is God, conceived as (something like) a universally underlying entity, from whom all particular existences are emanations. And pilgrims have a rich and beautiful set of images and stories that help them to conceptualise an encounter with it. The loss of innocence at the Fall begins our human career as exiles from the presence of the absolute; Christ’s exclamation “Wherefore hast thou deserted me?” is its tragic culmination, and his crucifixion is the means to its transcendence by all of us. The keys held by the bronze St Peter symbolise the possibility of a successful readmission to  the presence of the absolute. When pilgrims touch St Peter’s toes they know what they want: they want him to endorse them and help them in their quest for entry.

Now, regardless of whether it is true or false, that Christian story (of a separation from God and of striving for a redemption that brings a new unity with God) seems to map onto a form of human yearning, a sense of exile and incompleteness that is in some sense prior to religion and can be experienced in a secular fashion. If the Christian story is false (and there is no God, no separation from him, and no reunification either), then pervasive belief in that story cannot be explained by reference to it’s being true, and might well instead be explained in terms of this prior human yearning and sense of exile or separation.

The most plausible explanation for this prior-to-religious sense of a fundamental separation that must be overcome is likely to be a psychological one. But there is one particular manifestation of a secular “yearning for the real” that probably has at least a degree of autonomy from psychological causes. It is our interest in philosophy. Speaking naively, the project of philosophy is to characterise the real, and in particular to give an account of reality that succeeds in overcoming the big mystery that our first forays into philosophy generate: namely, the mystery of how it is that we can have any knowledge of reality at all.

Those first, naive, forays into philosophy occur very naturally to us all, usually in childhood. How do I know if there is anything there at all, really? Am I the only mind? Do you see the same as me when you see something you call “yellow” or feel the same as I do when you feel something you call “pain”? These are intuitively compelling questions that lead us into an equally intuitive and compelling naive philosophical scepticism. As soon as we ask these questions we are cast into a kind of exile from the reality that we had previously been immersed in. Our confidence that we are apprehending reality is shaken. The task of philosophy then becomes the laborious business of rebuilding that confidence, overcoming exile, reuniting us with the real.

It does this either like St Peter by supplying keys of various elaborate sorts that allow passage between our humble consciousnesses and a transcendent reality, or (perhaps more respectably) by providing a critique of the naive questions (together with their naive answers) that prompted our scepticism in the first place. Wittgenstein offers such a critique. When he says that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday,” he is referring to the fact that just as pilgrims and tourists, on their holy days and holidays, travel far afield to engineer an encounter with the real, philosophers (i.e. all of us, as soon as we ask those first naive questions) take language out of its home territory on a trip of a lifetime which is aimed at finding reality but in fact just problematises it in a way that generates the need for the kind of “therapeutic” philosophy that Wittgenstein practices, which largely involves taking language back home again.

Both religion and philosophy offer us ways of conceptualising and seeking to resolve a profound sense of exile or separation from reality, one that we also seek, rather blindly, to resolve in our daily life  (including, in my case at least, when we travel as tourists). Whatever psychological causes there are for this sense of exile are supplemented by the genuine intellectual concerns that give rise to philosophy. Historically, religion has served both to soothe the psychological sources of perceived exile and to address intellectual concerns about the nature of reality and the place of our consciousness within it. Over the centuries, those intellectual concerns have been inherited by philosophy. But while philosophy is the place to look for answers, religion continues to give us a rich mythology of our quest to apprehend the real. And if the real seems to remain beyond our grasp no matter how hard we study, or how many photographs we take, or how many stones we touch, the Christian story and all of its rich imagery at least gives us the consolation of making our exile a thing of great beauty.

WITTGENSTEIN AMONG THE SCIENCES

Posted by on March 15, 2012 3 comments

My new book, WITTGENSTEIN AMONG THE SCIENCES, is out today. I am feeling pretty excited; it looks GREAT. Have a look, here: http://ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=11016&edition_id=14506
What is the book about? I would describe it as a broadly post-Schutzian attempt to understand the nature of science, through working through and from the work of Wittgensteinians such as Kuhn and Winch. One of the aspects of it that may be of especial/broader interest is that I seek to inform policy-debates around science through it: e.g. to argue that science-policy ought to be relatively free of government direction, unlike technology-policy which should be subject to tight social constraints. In Part 2 of the book, I seek to employ Wittgensteinian thinking to help in the practical business of understanding the nature of psychopathology. Including the pscyhopathology of unrestrained economism… That is: I argue for instance that, while Friedman’s celebtrated monetary treatise on the U.S. economy and the Great Depression put the latter down in significant part to a failure of monetary policy to make enough money available, one key factor behind the 2007-now economic and financial crisis is a dubious thingifying attitude to money that was _encouraged_ by Friedmanian monetarism and that can be implicitly seen writ large in Friedman’s famous and hugely-influential article, “The methodology of positive economics”.
Enough tasters. See what you think. Let me know here?
(There is an ebook version available, btw.)

Thanks to everyone who helped me with the book, especially my editor Simon Summers. I’d like to mention particularly that the book was also greatly influenced by Wes Sharrock (a Winchian genius) and Bojana Mladenovic (whose work on Kuhn I bow to, which is not the kind of thing I say very often!).

The Heidegger and his McGilchrist

Posted by on October 14, 2011 5 comments

I’ve been reading Iain McGilchrist’s book The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world, and I wanted to blog about it. I’m going to be reviewing it for a journal. Here are some of my main thoughts so far…
This book, it seems to me, isn’t just a brilliant work; it’s an event. McGilchrist not only lays out a startling, novel account of the importance of the right hemisphere of the brain; he turns this into a gripping and dizzying account of the trajectory of the whole of human (but especially of western) civilisation, and offers in the course of this the most powerful argument penned by any living author of the importance of the arts and humanities. An argument – helpfully, by a scientist — for how and why the arts and the humanities offer an entire different and essential way of visioning (and reclaiming) our world, and for how and why science alone cannot do this but endlessly risks being part of an imperial take-over of the world by the scientistic world-picture that naturally emerges from the left hemisphere of the brain once it is off the leash.
The ‘master’ of the title is the right hemisphere; the ‘emissary’, the left. McGilchrist’s basic thesis is that most neurological events and processes need to begin (with the ability to assimilate — to see — the new) and end (with the ability to relate, vitally, humanly, and as a part of a whole(s)) with the right hemisphere. That the left hemisphere is essentially there to be the right hemisphere’s servant or emissary. But that the left hemisphere, with its great capacity not only for analysis but also for denial, is reluctant to give back to the right hemisphere the power it is lent with the result that, increasingly, and especially over the last 200 years, the master has been betrayed by its emissary. (N.B. It is crucial to appreciate that McGilchrist is NOT particularly committed to the nowadays-somewhat-ill-reputed view that the two hemispheres are above all the locations for different things or even different activities…That, he suggests, is itself an overly left-brained way of seeing the brain… What McGilchrist thinks centrally differentiates the two hemispheres is precisely rather: their ways of seeing, their styles…)
McGilchrist sees the (increasingly-dominant) left hemisphere world-view as seeing the world as if from the perspective, as we might put it, not even of a brain in a vat, but of a left hemisphere of a brain alone in a vat… We are in danger, then, of being even worse off than Descartes would have it.
Here is a remarkable passage from the latter part of the book, from which the reader will be able to get a sense of the scale of McGilchrist’s ambition hereabouts, and a scent of the grand originality with which, to a very large extent, remarkably, he delivers on it:

“[W]hat if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings – so that the realm of the actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering – not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind. // In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution.” (p.386)

Building on broadly Heideggerian thinking here, McGilchrist takes the measure of the world-picture that the left hemisphere has delivered to us. The re-grounding that the right hemisphere could bring, by way of reconnecting us to life on Earth (as with other ways in which it could do so, for instance via the arts, or via religion), is according to McGilchrist increasingly closed off to us, with the left hemisphere’s changing the very character of the Earth to be something like a ‘standing-reserve’ of ‘resources’ – one giant filling-station, to employ Heidegger’s terrifyingly apposite metaphor – and moreover one increasingly and actively patterned into the form of invariance, of mechanicity, of straight lines, of lifelessness, and at best (!) of ‘management’ of all this and of ‘nature’ itself. The fabric of the world is becoming fabricated, such that even the mirror ‘of nature’ no longer appears to us natural…

This book has already proved enormously controversial. (For example, Anthony Grayling somewhat slated it, in The Literary Review: www.literaryreview.co.uk/grayling_12_09.html . This is somewhat ironic, given the magnificent defence mounted in the book of the humanities, when juxtaposed with Grayling’s attempted launch recently of his own ‘New College of the Humanities’; it seems to me that Grayling hasn’t got the hang of McGilchrist’s book…) This controversiality is hardly surprising, for many reasons, but above all because the book goes against the grain. By saying that, I don’t mean for a minute to deny that the book has been appreciated by leading figures in neuroscience: such as Ramachandran, Panksepp, Hellige, Kesselring, Schore, Bynum, Zeman, Feinberg, Trimble, and Lishman. No; rather, my point is that the forces of the left hemisphere, deeply-culturally-hegemonic, are bound to resist it and indeed in many cases to have a profound difficulty comprehending it at all. As already intimated above: McGilchrist suggests that the very way we come to understand the right and left hemispheres is itself among the topoi distorted by our left-hemisphere-dominated world-view. (Thus for instance the way that the right hemisphere has for so long been deemed the ‘minor’ hemisphere.) He argues that there is a spiralling ‘dialectical’ relationship between the way in which our brain both limits and facilitates the way we ‘take’ the world, and between the way that the world’s (changing) nature influences but can constrain the way in which our brain is, and thus the way in which our brain both limits and facilitates…

The ‘foundation’ of the work, in neurology, may offer an unusual bridgehead, a way into our culture and in particular into the world of science, that historically most such defences and articulations of humanity as opposed to the dominance of technology etc. have lacked, however much (consider for instance the project of Hegel) they may have coveted it. As I shall shortly explain, however, McGilchrist’s authority and knowledge as a neurologist (and as a psychiatrist) may end up being a double-edged sword.

The master and his emissary is a work of extraordinary erudition. McGilchrist seems to be a polymath, who has managed to feel his way into a vast array of different ‘literatures’ (The book’s bibliography is so huge that the publishers refused to include most of it in the paperback version, and one has to go online to a special full bibliography to check many of the references). One of his influences is Lakoff and Johnson; he leans on their account of metaphor, and explores further its implications, thus expanding the account intimated by them in their masterly Philosophy in the flesh. This is congenial to me. (Like McGilchrist, I would be inclined to kindly draw a veil over those fairly-numerous moments in which the content of their important book is patently deformed by a grandstanding scientific imperialism.) I also warmed to McGilchrist’s hostility to much else of ‘Cognitive Science’: there is a powerful argument in the first Part of the book against the disastrous and ubiquitous ‘information-processor’ metaphor for the mind. McGilchrist shows how ‘information’ is a concept that only suits the left hemisphere, not the right. Again: McGilchrist in effect suggests that it is as if the brain that much mainstream Cog.Sci. envats is in fact only half a brain, and not even the most crucial half…
But McGilchrist’s greatest influence of all, also explored in a novel way in the first half of the book, is phenomenology in general, and Heidegger in particular. McGilchrist frequently in this book plays emissary to Heidegger, his ‘master’…
I mean that metaphor in a tongue-in-cheek way, just to raise perhaps a wry and friendly smile; but I also mean it somewhat in earnest. I had a niggling sense, repeatedly, as I read this book, that McGilchrist’s way of working is actually rather less ‘right-hemispherical’ than is that of his great heroes, who he often explicates to us grippingly in the course of the work: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Heraclitus, Goethe, Wordsworth, Blake, and (above all) Heidegger. To give a key for-instance; there is an obvious danger that his neuro-story involves a homuncular fallacy. For most of the book, McGilchrist writes almost as if the left and right hemispheres really were separate people, with intentions, wills, personalities, etc.
True, McGilchrist does deal with this point reflectively and explicitly at some length in the book on more than one occasion (see especially pp.98-99), pointing out that one perhaps in his game cannot escape having some model or other, and that the available alternatives are either the machine or the person (We might add also: the text, as in Ricoeur). He submits that the model of the person is far more accurate for something that on its own does have the capacity to form intentions, have goals, have values, sustain attention, etc. . Nevertheless, the extent to which McGilchrist buys into this ‘model’ could I think be regarded as dangerous: For, by splitting the human by hemisphere, he risks in the process occluding the very (holistic etc.) insights that he wishes to underpin. . .
It would be possible to give examples of undue left-brainedness in The master and his emissary even in relation to McGilchrist’s ‘master’, Heidegger. For instance, one might worry that when McGilchrist says, very helpfully (p.151), that truth is a process or a progress more than it is an object, still he does not go as far as Heidegger’s own analysis does: for Heidegger ultimately stresses that truth is what he calls an event rather than a process, because he takes a process to be something that takes place in time, whilst the event of truth is internally related to the very possibility of temporality and thus is that which facilitates a temporal sequence in which any process might take place.
One might also highlight McGilchrist’ss perhaps-regrettable failure to consider the contribution made by much of the growing political resistance to industrial-growthism etc. (e.g. it might have been worthwhile for him to have looked at the green movement, and/or perhaps at organisations such as ‘La Via Campesina’, the international peasant movement with 400 million members), a contribution that powerfully manifests the kind of thinking and being that he wants to recommend.
The great remaining objection others are likely to bring against McGilchrist’s work is probably that his detailed neuro-story is not needed in order to give his account of human civilisation and of the grave threat which it is now under, In other words, that there is (allegedly) insufficient connection between the first Part of McGilchrist’s book (which focuses primarily on the brain and on philosophy) and the second Part (which tells us a new history of the present). In other words, that the term ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ in the end function for McGilchrist largely metaphorically, rather than literally. At the very end of the book – the quotation that follows consists of its final two paragraphs — McGilchrist deals with this objection extremely disarmingly:

“If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these… // What [Goethe’s Faust, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Scheler and Kant] all point to is the fundamentally divided nature of mental experience. When one puts that together with the fact that the brain is divided into two relatively independent chunks which just happen broadly to mirror the very dichotomies that are being pointed to – alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on – it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth. But if it turns out to be ‘just’ a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world.” (Pp.461-2; cf. also p.7).

Again following Lakoff and Johnson as well as various great literary authors, then, McGilchrist to the end defends the absolute importance of metaphor (a phenomenon which only the right brain understands), and moreover of metaphor that remains metaphorical, and does not have to be ‘cashed out’. This could be a partial answer also to my worry, expressed above, about the ‘reification’ of the left and right brains into quasi-homunculi. It will however still leave a nagging twinge with some readers about how necessary all the detail about the brain in the early part of the book was to the real ‘cash-value’ of it: the account of these two, coherent, different ways of being in and molding (or not) the world, that comes to a head in the brilliant account (offered in the final 100 pages of the book) of the growing triumph of the left hemisphere in the Industrial Revolution, Modernism and Post-Modernism. All I can say in response to this worry is: read the book. For me, McGilchrist actually does a remarkable delicate job of ensuring that there is a genuinely historical dimension to his story of the faculties: for example, he has a fascinating discussion in Chapter 7, “Imitation and the evolution of culture”, of the possible biological routes through which neurology may respond to culture. The routes through which the very structure of the brain may be substantially responsive to and molded by — and not merely foundational for — the fabric of any given culture. That discussion crucially feeds into the story he then tells of the development of Western culture as a kind of battle of the hemispheres.
Whether what McGilchrist is telling us is a set of fascinating scientific truths about the brain, or a metaphorical history of the present inhabiting the reasons why the human race has reached the desperate near-ecocidal condition it now inhabits (and why it is – why we are — in denial about this), or both, what I found in reading his book is that there are gems on virtually every page, and that, whether or not it is ‘just’ a metaphor, the way of thinking and of seeing that McGilchrist here offers is itself compelling, rich, and fertile.
I’d be interested to know what other readers of this blog and of this book make of it.

Happy birthday, _Tractatus_!

Posted by on September 18, 2011 2 comments

As many readers/users of this site, will be aware, it is exactly 90 years since Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published (in German).
It’s also 60 years since Wittgenstein’s death.
And just over a decade since my collection The New Wittgenstein appeared in print.
Yesterday, I received in the mail my publisher’s free copies of my new book, Beyond the Tractatus Wars: The New Wittgenstein debate, in which my own piece argues that we need to take the ‘new’, resolute Wittgenstein very seriously indeed: I suggest that Conant and Diamond themselves have not been ‘severe’/'austere’ enough in their presentation of Wittgenstein’s first book. That it really does not say anything at all…

Enough said?

Check the book out: http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-new-book.html

If you have thoughts or comments about it, it would be interesting to hear them here.

Greening the future with the help of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers

Posted by on August 25, 2011 69 comments

It’s great to be joining the TP blog as a regular blogger. I thought I’d start by mentioning what my main philosophical research is about, right now.

So; my current project is a particularly small and easy one ;-)
…I’m working to find a solution to the central problem of our time: our (humans’) fairly-rapid and at-present seemingly-inexorable collective destruction of our collective life-support mechanism…

One of my proposals, being developed along with my main co-author Phil Hutchinson, is that Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists can help – that these are in fact ‘environmentalist’ philosophers (To read more, see my book PHILOSOPHY FOR LIFE, chapter 1).

It can seem shocking to suggest that James, Dewey and Wittgenstein be cast as (everyday) environmentalists. For we are accustomed to thinking of ‘environmentalism’ as a political category, and of philosophers as above politics. That widespread notion is however multiply-flawed. Firstly, the whole point of the suggestion in the previous paragraph is that one cannot make any sense of supposing creatures such as ourselves to exist except as utterly dependent upon and in an important sense therefore utterly immersed in our environing circumstances. Secondly, the merest common-sense for the species, of survival, ought to make ecologism, i.e. the sense that everyone is ‘downstream’ of everyone else (See Helena Norberg-Hodge’s marvellous film and book, ANCIENT FUTURES, for detail on this notion), into something that is genuinely basic for all politics, rather than being politically controversial. It is their not yet being common-sensical that makes things appear ‘political’ in some problematic and controversial way; what is needed is a politics that successfully acts so as to render the ideology of ecologism – an Earth-based ‘ideology’ – part of the ground, rather than figural. ‘Hegemonic’, in Gramscian terms. Thirdly, given that our societies are so tragically far from such far-sightedness, there is no way that being ‘politically controversial’ can be avoided – in making the transition to a thinking and a conducting of ourselves as if tomorrow truly mattered. And fourthly, it is in any case misguided to fantasise philosophy as would-be politically-neutral. This fantasy, fairly widespread in the English-speaking world, but much less attractive on the Continent (and directly contested in Dewey’s corpus, and also in Cornel West), is based upon a resistance to thinking deeply about the ‘therapy’ that our culture needs to go through, the changes that are required if it is to be truly assertible that we love wisdom and act accordingly. The drive toward depoliticisation of as much as possible is itself an aspect of the ‘liberal’ philosophy of mutual indifference that precisely requires challenging, if these changes are to occur.

How is this kind of thinking to become reality? How does the transition get made from philosophy to political action?

This writing that I am doing in itself could not possibly be enough, however brilliant it was and however widely read it might be. It needs to be ‘completed’– by you, and many more. In part, in action, including in actions that we do not anticipate and perhaps would not in some cases even welcome. (For Wittgenstein, the deepest meaning of philosophy being a ‘therapeutic’ enterprise is that the reader / listener needs truly to enter into the conversation.)

A truly Wittgensteinian solution to our problems, compatible I/we suggest with the best of the spirit of Pragmatism (with for instance the Jamesian right-to-believe; the Deweyan emphases on human animals as through-and-through environed, as through-and-through not subjects facing objects, as through-and-through not in need of a quest for certainty conceived of as knowledge-immune-to-doubt; the Peircean suggestion that belief is not really belief unless it be articulated into action (so long as this is not a tacit behavioristic claim, but rather a kind of moral or political one: On what basis are you (and are you not) prepared to act?); and so forth), _depends_ on the reader; and, ultimately, on there being a decent number _of_ such readers.

Which is one reason why it seems appropriate to canvass it here on this blog.