The owl spreads its wings

 

Image by Dawn Whitney-Hall

Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk. Any wisdom we might have (philosophy, self-knowledge) postdates the raw events of life. We experience - and only then the possibility of reflection and understanding.

And so in our last decades we draw a balance sheet. Our work in the world is mostly done: others will move the world forward: build families or utopias or theories of reality.

What is left to us is character itself: the perfection of self before we vanish like fleeting dew before the gathering light of a new day without us.

---

The psychotherapy community talks about the balanced type development of maturity; the Taoists talk about harmony and following the Way.

I agree with both. 

As 'stuff' which is conscious, we should do everything in our power to get this business of 'being' right. Not let ourselves down; not be marked down by those who interact with us.

---

What does failure look like?

A memory at which I cringe. Twenty years ago a discussion with a senior UK television executive. The consultancy I worked for was intending to do a project of some kind with him. I was under-briefed on the TV industry, an omission of which I was starkly aware.

With a much better prepared, but more junior colleague I met with him at a café in Paddington station. We talked and I have to say I monopolised the conversation, bombarding him with urgent questions as my ignorance and insecurity strove to get a handle on his world and the issues confronting him. He visibly shrank back under this remorseless hammering. My embarrassed friend interrupted me: "Why are you asking our client? I know all about this…"

I ignored him.

I never had any contact with that executive again. The project did not go ahead.

Another client described me once, frankly: "You make me feel like a butterfly, trapped by a pin, while you dissect me."

---

What do the advocates of mature type development and of the Tao tell us?

My MBTI is INTP (P shading to J). In the Jungian telling, I normally present an open, ideas-oriented face to the world (secondary, extraverted N) while my introverted analytic self tries to synthesise the logic of it (dominant introverted T)

But when I'm stressed and off-balance my subconscious anxieties take the driving seat. To quote a personality website:

"The dominant function of the INTP is their Ti, when they are in their shadow they become more focused on Te. When the INTP attempts to dominantly use this function it can cause them to be more direct, and even a bit aggressive in their attempts to get things done."

So that was me when I felt out of my depth. If only I had had the maturity and self-insight to recognise what was going wrong - and to stay balanced and calm!

But when one is 'trapped' in the constraints of career, there is little space for the cultivation of the self. Growing up remains a postponed project of one's later years. Better late than never.

---

Just as traditional Chinese medicine is a phenomenological approximation to scientific biology, so I used to imagine the Tao (The Way) as a pre-scientific cosmology. But of course it isn't.

The precepts of Taoism - the flow of water, the fluent motions of animals such as cats - prioritise categories of harmony which are at root psychological archetypes.

One is reminded of athletes talking of being in the zone, and going with the flow.

It is the battering of threats, physical and social, which judder us out of the flow, which force a conflict between id and superego which throws the ego into anguished incompetence. Hell is other people with destabilising agendas, threatening situations.

Yet there are no 'situations in themselves'; there are only our attitudes to situations: the framing, the paradigm in which we comprehend and emotionally react to them. And our reactions are our own - ours to frame. We have choices if we are self-aware enough. We are not condemned to be a slave to the shadow. 

I take Taoism to be a framework for self-preparation for just that. To consciously self-monitor and find a harmonious, balanced, mature response to events. All of them. Not to be possessed by one's Inferior function. I believe they call it Mindfulness.

How?

Ritualised forms or katas such as those of T'ai Chi or Qigong direct the mind-body complex towards self-confidence and calm. That which is attained during practice may spill over into general life. Sometimes all you need is a catalyst.

So I think I see a goal (I am aware that the real goal is to have no goal).

Grow up finally. Be wiser. Finish the work.

May 2022. 

"Marx: A Very Short Introduction" - Peter Singer

I was impressed by the readability and erudition of Peter Singer's VSI to Hegel, so decided to read his take on Marx.

Amazon link

I was disappointed. Singer is affectionately amusing on Marx's life and I agree with him that Marx retained a (materialist-reframed) Hegelian perspective throughout his life's work. But Singer struggles with Marx's notoriously tricky concept of value (abstract human labour), buying the argument that machines can create surplus-value. In Marxist thinking, only human labour can do that, reflecting the distinction between labour and labour-power.

Once you don't 'get' Marx's theory of value, then the theory of capitalist dynamics tends to go too, and you're left with a static evaluation of Marx's specific predictions, most of which did not track capitalism's evolution throughout the twentieth century.

Singer thereby concludes by seeing Marx more as an ethical philosopher than anything else, but that's a retreat too far. I would, however, be even harder than Singer on Marx's lamentably blank-slate view of human nature, which fatally undermines any naive presentation of Communism.

---

Singer also wrote this book, which is on my list:

Amazon link

I had thought I might be the only person in the world who cared about the synthesis between Marxism and evolutionary theory, specifically human sociobiology. But I guess that along with Peter Singer I should now add David Reich to my list of good guys too, although he's a liberal-leftist, not a Marxist.

"Hegel: A Very Short Introduction" - Peter Singer

Amazon link

Some days (not often) I wake up and wonder if instead of being a Marxist, I should subscribe to Hegelianism. Trouble is, Hegel (1770-1831) is so hard to understand. Back in August of last year I ordered Frederick Beiser's book, Hegel, but I over-reached. I now appreciate that Peter Singer is the place to start for the Hegel neophyte.

After a biographical sketch (life and times) Singer starts the tour with the Philosophy of History. Here Hegel reviews world history from 'oriental despotism' through antiquity (Greece and Rome, not considered the same), continuing to Christianity and then to the modern post-enlightenment state. He sees history as marking a transition from initially complete unfreedom through to its final state as conscious, free and dutiful community. (Many people considered his ideal as not a million miles away from the Prussian state which sponsored him, although Singer makes a good stab at refuting this).

Underpinning Hegel's notion of the progressive nature of history is the evolution of consciousness. Singer now takes us through one of the more obscure but central of his works: The Phenomenology of Mind. Here Hegel's Idealism (vs Materialism) is foregrounded as he examines historical consciousness developing towards completely self-awareness and the absolute. Hegel's treatment here is notoriously opaque and tortuous, brushing with ideas of psychology and religion. Singer does his best to extract a coherent line of argument.

The progress of history, expressive of the growth of mind/spirit, is a dialectical one, a transformatory logic which Hegel documented in the Science of Logic. Singer gives this work a more summary, concise treatment, drawing the links with Marx's dialectics.

The book ends with the aftermath. Hegel's more youthful works were highly dialectical and abstract; his later thinking arguably more concrete (though remember, this is Hegel) and more engaged with celebrating the Prussian state. After Hegel's death in 1831 his followers split into two camps. The Right Hegelians followed his mature thinking and vanished into obscurity; the Left Hegelians attempted to 'rescue' Hegel' from inadequate radicalism: this movement gave birth to Marxism.

Peter Singer's book is excellent, almost the perfect scene-setter for further exploration. I now understand better Marx's notes about turning Hegel on his head and removing the mysticism in his development of historical materialism.

Singer successfully conveys Hegel's overarching scheme .. but how convincing is it? Hegel's preoccupation with consciousness, freedom and duty as the true foundations of a dynamic reality could only seem plausible in a culture steeped in religion and the immanent presence of the supernatural. When Marx reconceptualised history as the dialectical process of men making history, but not under conditions of their own choosing, Hegel's ungrounded abstractions lost their force. So I've ceased to feel any of Hegel's gravitational pull on my thinking.

Diary: vexatious Sunday

My day starts with the Sunday Times and I'm reading Dominic Lawson on the James Damore/Google affair. I'm reminded of the illiterate and distorted editorials in The Times and The Economist (previous post) and I fantasise about cancelling my subscriptions as I ponder the old dilemma: (i) do they know the science but choose to lie about it, which makes them mendacious hypocrites; or (ii) have they not even bothered to check the relevant body of knowledge carefully cited by Damore, choosing instead to ventilate their blank-slate wish-fulfillment fantasies - which makes them incompetent.

In either case, why am I spending good money reading them? I console myself that The Economist does a good quarterly Technology Review and The Times occasionally has some useful news in it.

---

While Clare is at Mass I resume Frederick Beiser's Hegel.

When you read highly abstract discussions relating to substance, essence, the necessary, the contingent, the noumenon and phenomenon, the synthetic a priori, it's tempting to think that the underlying problem set these guys are wrestling with is impossibly abstruse.

Not so: at the end of the eighteenth century, with enlightenment rationality crumbling under the Reign of Terror and religion on the ropes, Hegel and the Romantics are struggling with straightforward questions.

• Is the universe a Newtonian machine or is there scope for free will?
• If knowledge is just representations in our minds, can reality be truly known?
• If we have free will, and God is not a personal judge, whence morality?

I think we have a good scientific framework for these questions today (not, of course, uncontroversial), but Hegel was definitely on the right track. His stuff is abstract both because the right scientific toolset hadn't yet been developed, but also because in a dynamic world of evolving connections, the individual concrete element of reality is conditioned by its relationships with other things - and some of those relationships are inherently abstract.

Quick example: you concretely see a human walking from one location to another where they start doing certain things in a structured way and conversing with others. What extra information about that scenario's history of embedding relations do you need to properly and fully understand what is happening?

If I tell you the person is a priest and he walked to his church? If I say she is a barista and she walked to her coffee shop in a now-desanctified church? How much more do you need to understand completely and fully? A lot.

You get the idea.

---

In our irreligious age, residual belief in God seems a mere foible. But Hegel was not an atheist, and to be consistent God had to be present in the ontology of reality. Looming over everything was Spinoza's immanent God, a divine presence infusing everything. But this leads to quietist, passive conclusions. If we are part of God, what scope for novelty or freedom?

Hegel adds conflict, dynamics and process through the dialectic, but does he really have a solution?

---

In the afternoon we strolled to Wookey and had toasted teacakes on our return.

The evening progresses,  I watch BBC coverage of the IAAF World Championships and my distaste with the deep feminisation of media culture surfaces again. Some Brit has just been disqualified in a walking race of epic length after three warnings, at the 10 km mark or thereabouts.

He seems tearful but full of resolve to do better in future. The BBC interviewer is like a trauma therapist: "How do you feel?" "Can you recover from this?" "You put in so much hard work!" ..

Call me systemising rather than empathising but - insofar as I care - I would rather have liked some footage of his DQ faults, and someone explaining technically what he had done wrong and what he should do about it.

Dispassionate analysis? Not what this is about.

OK. I'm done with being vexed for today .. until the BBC News at ten o'clock.

Diary: what I'm reading

I encountered Hegel (1770-1831) through others: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács. He seemed to precurse those theorists as some dark formless cloud: Jehovah brandishing an absolutist dialectical idealism.

It's time to engage with the void, to sketch the contours of the man himself. Although I have only just started Frederick Beiser's book, Georg emerges as a rather earnest young intellectual, engaged with Christianity (he trained in a Protestant seminary), absorbed into the early Romantic movement which brought us Keats, Byron and Shelley.

Amazon link

His mature works, however, have a reputation of being 'difficult' and obscure.

---

I'm prepared to add Hegel to my - rather short - list of heroes, joining Marx, Lukács and J. S. Bach. One day I need to do the Central European pilgrimage, searching out the geography of their lives and times.

When I was studying philosophy at Warwick University c. 1970, I reacted strongly against the anachronistic treatment of Plato, Aristotle, St. Anselm, Descartes, Kant et al. I was being asked to study in isolation systems of ideas based on outmoded, rigid categories of thought applied to an obsolescent framing of problems.

In most cases modern physics, computer science and AI had totally transformed the paradigms in which these issues were posed. I felt like I was being asked to learn the Phlogiston theory of heat on equal terms with modern Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics - yet none of the lecturers seemed to notice or care. I never subsequently changed that opinion.

I guess that made me a historicist - like Hegel .. and Marx.

For Marx, philosophical categories were mediated by and abstracted from the concrete (social) experiences of individuals within their specific historical circumstances: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas".

Made a lot of sense to me.