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Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Weird tales


Trent Dougherty has a good post at the Prosblogion where he cries foul on the attacks on the case for mental causation, or the existence of God, or etc., when such attacks base themselves on the grounds that the objects of their attack are "weird" or "spooky." Dougherty finds this dismissal unacceptable. "If anyone should be able to get past the weird, it is philosophers," he says. This cannot but remind me of Harman's reiterated point that "The real is much weirder than common sense can imagine."

This calls to mind some recent posts by Fabio Gironi at Hypertiling and by Ben Woodward at NaughtThought, regarding the pertinence of the category "weird." Gironi wants to urge caution when it comes to weirdness, e.g. a frequent recurrence to Lovecraft in certain quarters of the philosophical blogosphere (on which fad I have weighed in here). Certainly, Gironi concedes, the world is very strange, and exceeds our capacity to theorize it; but this does not mean that there is no knowledge. Both philosophy and weird fiction share a focus upon the meaningless of the in-itself, Gironi thinks, but this overlap is a potential liability for the philosopher who is tempted too strongly in the direction of a kind of overwrought style in which connotation swamps precision.
[A] balance must be reached. An excessive emphasis on the weirdness, inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of reality in itself (re)produces a secular form of a vacuous mysticism of darkness (which is more self-congratulatory than philosophically fertile) and undermines naturalism by re-imbuing nature of ‘supernatural’ traits. On the other hand, we should be cautious with hyper-rationalisms, relying on the sheer power of pure thought to comprehend everything, for that is just the flipside of the old theological coin: on the one hand negative theology (which is always about meaninglessness for-us), on the other confidence in the lumen naturalis of reason (which ultimately banishes meaninglessness in-itself). The limits of our epistemic grasp cannot be overcome via either poetic talk nor via a mysteriously efficacious intellectual intuition. They can only be probed and pushed by rational inquiry.
This fine paragraph, which in some ways is the center of Gironi's contention, not only lays out his via media between effusive weirdness and triumphalist apodicticism, but also suggests that the weird is a contemporary modulation of ancient apophaticism ("negative theology"). This is certainly right in one sense, and several thinkers are starting to re-appropriate certain moves of medieval negative theology. (I am thinking, for instance of Eugene Thacker's engagement with pseudo-Dionysus and Nicholas of Cusa in After Life.) I can only agree with Gironi that the moves of negative theology will not accomplish anything by themselves-- but I obviously disagree with him if he means that apophaticism per se is a cop-out or a symptom of a discredited rationalism. I would sooner say that the discreditation of rationalism is a symptom of the abandonment of a real apophaticism-- negative theology that was aimed not at formulating an ingenious system for the intellect to recite, but at leading the whole person, including the intellect, into the cloud of unknowing. This is not the conclusion of an argument but an experience.

To some degree this would seem to put me more on Woodward's side, when against Gironi he invokes Pierre Hadot in his account of why Lovecraftian weirdness is useful in his own philosophical project. Hadot, too, believed in the cultivation of philosophy for experiential ends, though he came to hold a somewhat chastened estimation of the availability of mystical experience. But of course this alliance is not perfect, as Woodward's account of his motives indicates:
I do not see myself as making nature supernatural – Lovecraft and the weird are extremely useful for me in cracking the dense aesthetic/affective shell around nature, nature as caught between what Pierre Hadot has set up as the Orphic and the Promethean. That is: to weird nature, to set it as something which gives rise to and eventually undoes thought, is not to make it supernatural, it's to de-supernaturalize thought, to break a certain degree of the (ungrounded) transcendental quarantine on thought.
Woodward here is referring to Hadot's distinction, in The Veil of Isis, of two attitudes towards nature, the technological "Promethean," and the poetic "Orphic." It's an oversimplification but one may gloss this by saying that the former tries to wrest nature's secrets by force (the famous Baconian move of putting her to the rack) while the latter is an attitude of attentive listening.

As I read Woodward, he sees the weird is an unsettling effect, which enables him to reject a legacy of (perhaps unexamined) supernaturalism in the self-thinking of thought. I on the other hand am willing to bite the supernaturalist bullet--at least as an admissible description of the weird reality we inhabit. To say "admissible description" does not mean that I am agnostic about this--nature is grounded (I hold) upon something deeper, and something which is neither Nietzschean nor Meillassouxian hyperchaos--but I am open to various vocabularies for discussing this ground, since for me the relevant category is not causality but meaning.

This brings me back to Dougherty's post. What follows is the gist of a comment I posted there, which has yet to appear (and may not, I suppose). The out-of-hand dismissal of "weirdness," as if this ad hominem sufficed by itself to refute an argument, is not a logical move but a rhetorical one--it appeals to a shared culture, and is the equivalent of a knowing look or a raised eyebrow. This does not make it illegitimate (appeals to shared mores of discursive communities are certainly in-bounds), but it is a move based in opinion and as such it is more or less the opposite of philosophy strictly speaking. I don't say that philosophers cannot avail themselves of such moves (philosophy is always having to re-invent the distinction between itself and sophistry), but they ought to be clear on what they are about. What I like about Gironi's and Woodward's discussion, though I ultimately disagree with both of them (with Gironi because I reject his account of theology and Woodward because I don't share his motivation for recourse to weirdness, which is more or less the opposite of mine), is that it's a discussion of the overlap between philosophical style and content, a discussion which acknowledges that the boundary between these is itself a point of negotiation.
Heisenberg's account of physical explanation seems pertinent here:
It is impossible to explain...qualities of matter except by tracing these back to the behavior of entities which themselves no longer possess these qualities. If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell.
This really is just to say that one cannot explain how opium works by postulating a dormative property.

Analogy is dangerous, but I want to suggest, in the spirit of Aquinas' cosmological arguments, that all ordinariness will be satisfactorily accounted for only in terms of the not-ordinary; which is to say, some version of the weird. Dougherty puts the reason for this very succinctly:
we face a choice among mysteries, not a choice between mystery and something else.
However this choice may be delineated, the most relevant terms I see are those between a weird that is meaningless, or a mystery that is meaningful. The present age is dominated by the drive to explain the latter in terms of the former. I am concerned to understand the former in terms of the latter.

8 comments:

  1. "Harman's reiterated point that "The real is much weirder than common sense can imagine.""

    Harman is talking nonsense! Our precious common sense is the result of a long process of evolution and had it not been adaptive by way of being mostly on the right track figuring out reality or nature, it would have been selected out, or wiped out, which is tantamount to saying we would not be around to spew philosophical nonsense.

    "when such attacks base themselves on the grounds that the objects of their attack are "weird" or "spooky." Dougherty finds this dismissal unacceptable. "If anyone should be able to get past the weird, it is philosophers," he says."

    He overlooks the fact that the weird has been the stock in trade of so many philosophers in the history of philosophy. Here is a short catalog:

    There is no change. (proclaimed by Parmenides who was a child, then a youth, then a middle-aged person, and then old, and who witnessed changes around him and in him by the hour)

    Only universals are real, not particulars. (said by Plato who was a particular individual born to particular parents and whose life, including his capacity to think particular thoughts, depended on so many particulars in the world.)

    Material objects are actually and literally ideas. (said by Berkeley - the notion that he only maintained that material objects depend for their existence on an observer is a gross distortion of his far more "far out" view - who was a physical entity existing in space and time and dependent on other spatio-temporal physical entities)

    At the very least, the "weird" is what is at odds with common sense, our normal experience and knowledge, and the stock of truths we rely on in our everyday functioning.

    Now, it is logically possible that what is weird is true. However, this has as much significance as saying that it is logically possible that I am typing these lines sitting in an alien spacecraft docked above Neptune!

    As Carl Sagan put it, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." So, the case urging us to take seriously what is weird should be very, very strong indeed.

    Instead, what we usually find in purveyors of the weird, particularly the religious or philosophical weird, are pathetic appeals to mere logical possibility, argumentum ad ignorantiam (P must be true or plausible because it has not been proven false) run amok, appeal to tradition, appeal to authority, and so on.

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  2. "I want to suggest, in the spirit of Aquinas' cosmological arguments, that all ordinariness will be satisfactorily accounted for only in terms of the not-ordinary; which is to say, some version of the weird."

    At least one example of this which withstands critical scrutiny would be helpful.

    On the other hand, this thesis is at odds with the progress of science and of the scientific method which has succeeded in unmasking the so-called weird in terms of the ordinary and the natural, e.g., "spirit possession", "miracles of healing", eclipses, comets, thinking and feeling, dreaming, etc.

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  3. “Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. “
    Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927), p. 286 J.B.S. Haldane

    We don’t have to entertain pulp ontology to get that and the alternative is not what Yeats called whiggery - ‘a rancourous, rational, levelling sort of a mind’.

    The rational is not opposed to the apophatic, the cataphatic is and neither ought the rational to be the domain of the noetic nimby-folk who police the boundaries of what is sense. ‘From the redoubts of common sense we peer with our pea-shooters at the ready for the onslaught of the uncanny hordes with their single, glittering eyes.’

    How has the sufi imaginal been missed in these discussions not to speak of the kaballah and other theories of ‘many mansions’?

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  4. Thill,

    I'll l eave aside your litany of examples of philosophical weirdness, as I think it is clear Dougherty agrees with you on this. He's not leaving these out of account; his target is the contemporary philosopher who plays the 'but that's just weird' argument.

    On the other hand, this thesis is at odds with the progress of science and of the scientific method which has succeeded in unmasking the so-called weird in terms of the ordinary and the natural

    I have not overlooked this. The progressive evacuation of the natural world of havens for superstition is not only something I recognize but something I welcome. But I do not see this as an end in itself. One need not subscribe in every respect to Weber's diagnosis of our Entzauberung to see that the contemporary human world is a scandal of enshallowment. What is called for is a discourse about ourselves that can do justice to the indisputable effectiveness of scientific method without turning a blind eye to the dessication of spirit. Ontology has a part in this.

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  5. Om.,

    Thank you for supplying the Haldane quote, which had I included it would have been mis-attributed to Einstein anyway (bad memory).

    As re negative theology: obviously both apophatic and cataphatic can proceed via rational discourse, though there is a moment in the apophatic progression at which the pertinence of the rational does kind of fall away.

    My expectation is that the kabbalah and sufiism and so on will make their destined assignations in Speculative Realism in good time. My concern is that it will all be so much scholarship, though I would love to be wrong about this. I know nothing of Eugene Thacker aside from his book, but I do not emerge from my reading of After Life with the sense that he and Nicholas of Cusa (e.g.) would find each other congenial. There is a piety to the latter that is lacking in Thacker-- a sense that more than theory is at stake. If I have mis-judged Thacker's intentions then I will have to re-read. He does treat Dogen and Suhrawardi.

    In any case, yes, I might have mentioned some of these other strains. Though I am not a kabbalist nor a Sufi. I have a post on Corbin cooking on one of these Bunsen burners around here.

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  6. Om Whatever,
    The alternative is also not a pretentious and portentous, metaphysico-theologico-cosmonigonology a la Dr. Pangloss in the name of "enchantment" or "reenchantment" of the world!

    After quoting Haldane, where are you? Indeed, after he penned those queer lines where was Haldane himself? Well, by no means in that so-called charming "queer" world he had imagined, but squarely in the ordinary world of tables, people, birds, insects, weird philosophical treatises, and such!

    The only difference between the philosophical Haldanes of this world and others is that the philosophical Haldanes have mastered the art of bewitchment by means of language and get handsomely paid too for that.

    "The progressive evacuation of the natural world of havens for superstition is not only something I recognize but something I welcome."
    Skholiast, I presume you are aware that this has involved the rejection of many "weird" theories of reality?

    "the contemporary human world is a scandal of enshallowment."

    The very tradition of the weird you are talking about will tell you that shallowness and depth, boredom and enchantment are a function of the observer's consciousness.

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  7. "turning a blind eye to the dessication of spirit."

    Adapting Nietzsche's remark on the soul and the body, one could say that "spirit" is just a name for something about matter.

    In this light, what you are talking about, if I understand it correctly, would actually be a desiccation of matter.

    Aurobindo's talk of a "sacramental attitude" toward matter would now be germane.

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  8. What is not ordinary need not necessarily be inconsistent with it. Since the weird is inconsistent with the ordinary, what is not ordinary is not necessarily the weird. Therefore, the expression "which is to say" in the following remark signals a non sequitur.

    "all ordinariness will be satisfactorily accounted for only in terms of the not-ordinary; which is to say, some version of the weird."

    Further, this project is doomed at the outset because the ordinary is presupposed in the identification and explanation of the so-called not-ordinary. Try identifying, let alone explaining, the so-called not-ordinary without use of the faculties of common sense and ordinary language.

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