Strange Doctrines

Creating as Discovering II: "Inventing" v. "Creating" Values

If you've read Rob Sica's comment to my first post, you'll already know that the German verbs for 'find' [finden] and 'invent' [erfinden] have an immediately apparent etymological relation. Interestingly, the English word 'invent' has a conceptually similar (but noncognate) etymology, from the Latin invenīre, to "come upon," and so too a conceptual relation to "finding" or "discovering."

One way to understand Nietzsche's talk about "inventors [Erfinder] of new values," then, might be to say that such inventors are simply those new philosophers in the advance guard who independently "come upon" -- which is to say, discover -- those (theretofore undiscovered) values.

There are two clear problems with this reading, however. First, as already discussed, Nietzsche elsewhere also talks of "creating [schaffen] values" (e.g., BGE 211). The German verb schaffen, a cognate of the English 'shape' (OE scapan, pp of scieppan, meaning to 'create', 'form' or 'destine'), has none of this connotation of "discovery" as far as I know (though the connection with 'destine' is possibly suggestive).

Second, and more importantly, Nietzsche clearly wants to mark some kind of distinction between finden and erfinden. (See, e.g., sections 11 and 12 of BGE, which Rob cited.) A realist or otherwise normatively privileged reading (cf. Leiter) has to make sense of this distinction such that the relevant Erfindungen ("inventions") are more than merely arbitrary fictions or contrivances.

Classic

If you're like me, when you were a kid you encountered sundry lamentations by the adults in your life about how "kids today" don't enjoy the classics anymore. Time perception being what it is, this kind of complaint probably seems plausible to a ten-year old (however little a ten-year old will sympathize).

As you get older, though, you realize that "classics" in this context merely referred to whatever form of pop entertainment those adults enjoyed when they were kids.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Improving Realist-Relativist Relations

Since realism and relativism are typically (and erroneously) considered opposed and incommensurable metaethical positions, a little brush-clearing is in order before I attend to considering whether Nietzsche is both. So:

Punk'd Art

Reading this article about the nebulous identity conditions of art reminded me of my first visit to the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Proceeding through the gallery, I encountered many works of "art," some more plausibly designated by the term than others.

Until finally I happened upon a piece that had been constructed by carefully mounting an early model air conditioning unit on a wall painted in the prevailing local color, a distressed goldenrod. I couldn't tell who the artist was, but if I'd had to guess, I probably would have gone with Duchamp.

Turns out, though, it was just an air conditioner.

Who could know?

Selling the Divine Before Its Time

Mark Kleiman shares the recipe for the Summun religion:

Mix some basic Heraclitus with bits of Bishop Berkelely, astrology, and Taoism. Throw in some generalized New Age gibberish for flavor. Serve chilled.

The result, as Kleiman notes, is something not easily distinguished from an "elaborate hoax."

However, that's only because the recipe doesn't specify the right cooking time. Bake for a couple millennia, and the result will surely be a religion that embodies a rich tradition of spiritual metaphor worthy of our respect.

Creating as Discovering: Is Nietzsche's Relativism for Real?

This series of posts will be given over to considering the possibility that Nietzsche is both realist and relativist (or subjectivist) about value. (Think "New Shimmer.")
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The Divine Position

Rob Sica helpfully points us to Anthony C. Edwards' The Plain Sense of Things.

One of the Amazon reader-reviewers describes the book as aimed at this question: "How do we give our lives meaning in an age where religion has lost its POWER?" Setting aside whether that's an accurate statement of the book's focus (the book preview signals related but slightly different concerns), I'd go one level deeper: How do we give our lives meaning when we've discovered that religion never had the power we thought it did?

Taking Nihilism Seriously

The Führer Was Such a Marvelous Dancer

Nice. Austrian television personality Klaus Emmerich ("the Wolf Blitzer of Austria") finds Obama's victory an "extremely disconcerting development," because "blacks aren't as politically civilized."

Emmerich added that he "wouldn't want the Western world to be directed by a black man." No doubt.

Ah, the salad days of the Reich...

Making Nice

Are religious folks nicer than atheists? No, argues Paul Bloom in Slate.

You Had Me At "Would You Like To Be Famous?"

From the New York Times:

In studies over the past few years, researchers have demonstrated how quickly trust can build in the right circumstances. To build a close relationship from scratch, psychologists have two strangers come together in four hourlong sessions. In the first, the two share their answers to a list of questions, from the innocuous “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” to the more serious, like “If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?”

In the second session, the pair competes against other pairs in a variety of timed parlor games. In the third, they talk about a variety of things, including why they are proud to be a member of their ethnic group, whether Latino, Asian, white or black. Finally, they take turns wearing a blindfold, while their partner gives instructions for navigating a maze.

Trivial as they may sound, those exercises create a relationship “that is as close as any relationship the person has,” said [social psychologist] Art Aron....

The new relationship can last months or longer, and it almost immediately lowers a person’s score on a variety of prejudice measures. Moreover, it significantly reduces anxiety during encounters with other members of that second group....

Art Aron and others have found that, by generating a single cross-group friendship, they can quickly improve relations between cliques that have been pitted against one another in hostile competitions. In a continuing study of some 1,000 new students at Stony Brook, Dr. Aron has found that merely being in the same class where other interracial pairs were interacting can reduce levels of prejudice.

"As close as any relationship the person has" -- amazing. Humans are so easy.

Risky Philosophy - Part II

I just now realized I never got around to Part II on "risky philosophy." So let me do that now, discussing what it is that makes risky philosophy "risky." I can think of three risky effects, which respectively I'll call mysterianism, specious legitimation, and misdirection by abstraction. I'll discuss these below the fold.

tra·di·tion \trə-`di-shən\ n: the conservation of political inequality

From the San Francisco Chronicle (via 3 Quarks Daily):

"We're confident voters did go to the polls to vote 'yes' to protect traditional marriage," said Chip White, a spokesman for the Prop. 8 campaign.

Similarly, opposing the Thirteenth Amendment would have been protecting "traditional ownership."

And opposing the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments would have been protecting "traditional representation."

The only thing such appeals to tradition seem much good at is protecting traditional inequality.

Oh, random fun fact: The word 'tradition' is etymologically related to the word 'treason'. Let's take the hint next time, California.

Shattering the Glass Ceiling

They said it couldn't be done. But Obama did it. At last our children can grow up in a country where an Islamo-socialist Fake American^TM is president.

How's My Voting?

Krugman this morning espied the following bumper sticker slogan: “Vote for the hero and the hottie.”

Well I'm sorry, but Joe Biden just isn't that hot.

Election Day Gloating

No, not over the result. (After all, who could possibly predict what the result's going to be, what with all the shifting momentum and whatnot being "reported"? It's a complete, imponderable enigma.)

No, I'm gloating because I'm so uncommonly close to a polling station. About a 1-minute and 37-second jog. It usually takes me less time to vote there than it would by absentee ballot.

Today was a bit different, though. For the first time, I actually encountered a measurable waiting time. About eleven minutes and change.

So suck on that, all of you out there standing in voting queues of Third World dimensions. Suck on that.

UPDATE: I was about to condemn Eric Martin for his superior polling place propinquity (his polling station is in the lobby of his apartment building), but read on and found out he nonetheless had to wait over an hour. So, yeah, I'm still riding high on that sweet electoral Schadenfreude.

Findings on Funny

This is interesting:

We [Elisabeth Malin and Dan Ariely] approached 285 individuals in public places in Boston, asking them to answer a few questions about their political beliefs, and most importantly to rate how funny they found 22 jokes (see all jokes below). Some of the jokes we used were more funny, some were less funny, and in general they fell into seven categories: race, religion, golf, employment, Jack Handey's deep thoughts, marriage, and family. Participants were asked to rate each joke on a scale from 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious).

At the end we had 140 self declared liberals and 145 self declared conservatives, and the results were not at all what we expected. As it turned out conservatives gave significantly higher rating to the jokes in each of the seven categories....

Here is how I interpret these data: To be a conservative living in Boston, you need to have a really good sense of humor.

(Via the New York Times.)

Immortality and Boredom

Patrick Lee Miller argues that it is fundamentally a mistake to desire an eternal life. His argument has roughly two parts. First, he says, finitude is a precondition for meaning. Second, eternity would get plain boring.

I've already addressed the first part of the argument. Here now to the second, which incorporates discussion of Jorge Luis Borges' “The Immortal,”

his fable of a soldier whose quest for the city where none dies costs him dearly, but never so dearly as his success. For after reaching this city and drinking from its magical stream, he learns that among its immortal citizens “every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem....” To digest this enervating insight, and others like it, meditate for a moment upon some of the peculiar consequences of infinite time.

Were you to live infinitely, for instance, you would have enough time to live not only your own life any number of times, but also the lives of others, all others, likewise infinitely. Perhaps the boredom provoked by eternity would even require you to seek the relief of novelty. If so, Borges’ concludes, in the city of the immortals individuality disappears: “no one is someone; a single immortal man is all men.” But the preservation of individuality—especially after death has robbed us of a unique beloved—is the chief appeal of eternity. Thought through a little further than its initial appeal, in short, eternity appears more frustrating than satisfying.

It seems to me there are two rejoinders to Borges we might lodge here, even granting the limits on combinatorial novelty he presupposes. [1] First, humans forget. [2] This means that we could never really cease to have "new" experiences. [3] That being so, it is unlikely ennui could realistically be a consequence of eternal life. [4]

Second, we could easily reformulate the desire for eternity as merely a desire to live as long as it pleases us. [5] However prolific a person might be, 50 or 70 or 120 years is nowhere near enough time to exhaust the universe of meaningful projects available within an ideally coherent life. It could not matter to many of us that on ideal reflection we wouldn't desire eternity, because at any foreseeable margin, almost all of us would desperately petition for just a little more time. And nature's hostility to that desire is no less tragic than its hostility to our yearnings for eternity, however inchoate they might be.

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NOTES

1. The presupposition is only arguable. Suppose there is some finite number n of possible activities or provisional identities that can be instantiated. It does not follow that there are only n possible orderings of these activities. And orderings give shape to our lives.
    For example, suppose (hyperunrealistically) that n = 2, and that this universe of "identities" I can assume comprises fisherman and novelist. Suppose then that I spend the course of what would be a normal lifetime L as a fisherman. I follow up this period L₁ with L₂, this time as a novelist. Now, at the end of L₂, have I exhausted all the possibilities that life has to offer? Of course not -- for in L₃, I could return to fishing having spent a lifetime as a novelist. And in L₄; I could return to writing novels having returned to fishing having spent a lifetime as a novelist. And so forth.
    Now maybe the value in novel (no pun intended) insights to be derived from each subsequent iteration is subject to diminishing returns, so that eventually they'd fail to motivate a desire for more time. But at least theoretically, the sequence of possible valuable insights that could be drawn from this highly circumscribed set of repeated episodes would never reach the limit point; there would always be some value in each new repetition.

2. Nietzsche observes (albeit in the context of making a very different sort of point) that we need forgetfulness "to make room for new things," that "there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness." GM, Second Essay, Sec. 1.

3. Note that this forgetfulness doesn't mean that we would lose any semblance of personal identity, since even after forgetting, we inherit personal, psychological characteristics that constitute identity-preserving links with our "former" selves.

4. Yes, some people would become bored with eternal life, just as some become bored with finite life; but such is not inevitable in any particular case, and in any case it's not a risk peculiar to immortality.

5. This is related to the point I made in my earlier post about the autonomy we enjoy in ordering our episodic pursuits. Our choice to end a given pursuit short of the completion we'd originally contemplated for it won't deplete that pursuit of any meaning if doing so is our choice and reflects our (revised) objectives.

McCain Loves Laborers Lost

Joe the Plumber. Tito the Builder. And now Jay the Contractor.

I can't wait until they get the endorsement from Earl the Jacuzzi Salesman.

Life's Defective Cadence

Slowly, ruthlessly, one by one, death takes from us those we love the most. And then, eventually, it takes us.

There are roughly two ways of reconciling our desire for life with this gradual, careless annihilation. One is to posit a transcendent eternity. The other is to accept the finitude of our existence and find within its bounds some form of immanent redemption.

The former strategy won't concern me here. I want to look at the latter strategy, within which the most common move seems to be to cast finitude as the very precondition for any meaningfulness at all -- the tack Patrick Lee Miller takes in his poignant essay here. (I'm only dealing with a small part of his overall argument here, so please read the whole thing.)