subject:"Western Rationality"

Originally Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point - i.e.
the heart has its reasons of which reason doesn't see the relevance or in
which reason sees no point, i.e. the rational intellect can understand the
reasons of the heart (affective impulses, inclinations, emotions welling
up naturally in the body) but does not admit them as a real factor in
argumentation or rational inference, i.e. the ratio seeks precisely to
abstract from that (or must abstract from that in order to function), or
alternatively, ratio and sentio are incompatible, referring to different
modes of functioning or different frames of reference. Hence my comment
about the ratio not admitting the reasons of the heart as the essence of
the idea.

This question is investigated by George Lakoff who explores the limits of
Cartesian rationalism in terms of the distinction between how Americans
think that they think, and the real processes which occur when Americans do
think. But long before that, the British psychiatrist R.D. Laing had already
analysed the schizoid conditions which result from the counterposition of
reasons and feeling, and even earlier, Wittgenstein demonstrated how this
counterposition leads, among rational thinkers, to the result of
tautological statements.

In our own time, capitalist society resolves this through sucking and
fucking, through sexual development, but this of course doesn't necessarily
have anything to do with the reasons of the heart because sex does not
necessarily express authentic feeling, and the comprehensive bourgeois
attempt to manipulate, influence, cajole or force a person into sexual
activity within a situation of unfreedom may lead to alienated sexuality,
sexual denial, sexual displacement, and the conversion of sexual
access/satisfaction into a contested object through which capitalist
competition is projected, resulting in more heartlessness which may not even
be recognised because of the idea of normality being operated with.

Commerce recognises no human heart, only desire, because desire is a basic
motive in the urge of the human organism to appropriate and consume, which
is indispensable for selling a product (even if that product is a heart
for which desire exists which can be converted into monetarily effective
demand), and thus in its instrumental rationality commerce seeks to abstract
out and focus on the motivational impulses of desire. The heart however
integrates desire with the total complex of emotions of the human organism,
which are influenced by the values prompt the morality (behavioural norms)
of the human organism and its experiential history.

In general, one can say that capitalist development proceeds through
displacing the object of appropriation from its original context, splitting
it out into its constituent components, and reassembling those components
into a product which can be sold (appropriated through the market) in
another context, a process of analysis and synthesis which can have both
humanising and dehumanising consequences, depending on the situation. This
idea, which inspired Marx, still seems to strike a chord today, i.e. the
concept of alienation he formulates seems to have a genuine historical
validity.

Jurriaan


- Original Message -
From: andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 5:13 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Western rationality


 Pascal's Pensees, Sec IV. para 277.

 --- ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
  but then, 'the heart has its reasons, that reason
  does not know'!
  
  
   I think it is in reality more like, 'the heart has
  its reasons, that reason
   does not admit'.
  
 
  perhaps, but i like the original version (pascal?)
  since it brings out
  the incompleteness of knowledge arrived at through
  reasoning alone (and
  thats not just incompleteness in a mathematical
  sense, but even
  incompleteness in the sense of certainty required to
  act).
 
  --ravi


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Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread ravi

Carrol Cox wrote:
 ravi wrote:

perhaps, but i like the original version (pascal?) since it brings out
the incompleteness of knowledge arrived at through reasoning alone (and
thats not just incompleteness in a mathematical sense, but even
incompleteness in the sense of certainty required to act).

 From my own reading in contemporary neuroscience, I would say that there
 is no such thing as reasoning alone. Separate parts of the brain are
 in action, but they cannot operate without each other. Hence neither the
 heart nor the reason has reasons of its own. Without the intervention of
 reason the heart cannot have its own reasons, and without the action
 of the heart, reason cannot reason.


well, my viewpoint is materialistic and mechanistic (what that means at
the quantum level i do not know), so yes, i would say that the process
of reaching a conclusion (with or without some inputs) is arrived at
through some mechanical/electro-chemical processes involving the
interaction of elements of the body with each other and the body with
the external environment.

my hint to what i mean by reason alone above is in my mention of the
notion of incompleteness. what i mean by reason alone is a sequence of
atomic logical inferences (which i would guess is the sort of definition
that a logical positivist or an aynd rand type would find agreeable)
that can be carried out in a mechanical device such as a computer or a
human being. one could, arguably, carry out this sterile process within
one's mind, rejecting any other impulses or intuitions (or what have
you) -- the ensuing conclusion can then be claimed to be arrived at
using 'reason alone' or perhaps 'objective reasoning'.

[as a leftist, i am not against such a process or basing debate on some
form of such a process. i do believe appeal to such is essential to
break various vicious cycles prevalent in current debate]. the question
is, while it is true that this mechanical process will never lead us to
all truths, will some slightly modified version of it lead us to the
necessary truths to base one's actions on? (for example: while the
standard deductive process, or in particular the first order theory of
arithmetic, might not be complete, mathematicians have not had to step
outside the process to derive important results).

i read pascal's (thanks for the confirmation jks) statement as a 'no'
answer to the above question. the point may be that all conclusions are
underdetermined (should i add, in the real world as opposed to the world
of mathematical entities), or a simpler pragmatic one that problems of
complexity would impact the utility of 'reason alone'. the complexity
problem perhaps might be solved in some quantum computing sense (and i
leave it to ian to understand that stuff ;-)) or by nature, through a
process of parallel computation that encodes shortcut algorithms or
steps into the surviving device.

--ravi


p.s: to complete my point regarding the use of 'reason' to settle
debates, given that i see no way around it, the fact that the results
cannot be taken as conclusive, impels me to heed feyerabend's advice to
act with tolerance, and to work with the people rather than from above them.

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread Devine, James

 From my own reading in contemporary neuroscience, I would say 
 that there
 is no such thing as reasoning alone. Separate parts of the brain are
 in action, but they cannot operate without each other. Hence 
 neither the
 heart nor the reason has reasons of its own. Without the 
 intervention of
 reason the heart cannot have its own reasons, and without the action
 of the heart, reason cannot reason.

that's true. But I think it's useful to _try_ to separate reason and emotion, in full 
knowledge that they
really can't be separated. Otherwise, one's emotions can fool one's reasoning (or 
vice-versa). 
In the end, emotions can't be suppressed, so we have to bring emotions and reason back 
together 
again (not that they were really separated). 
Jim

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread Ted Winslow

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:

Originally Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point - 
i.e.
the heart has its reasons of which reason doesn't see the relevance or 
in
which reason sees no point, i.e. the rational intellect can understand 
the
reasons of the heart (affective impulses, inclinations, emotions 
welling
up naturally in the body) but does not admit them as a real factor in
argumentation or rational inference, i.e. the ratio seeks precisely to
abstract from that (or must abstract from that in order to function), 
or
alternatively, ratio and sentio are incompatible, referring to 
different
modes of functioning or different frames of reference. Hence my comment
about the ratio not admitting the reasons of the heart as the 
essence of
the idea.
Perhaps the idea of reason underpinning this contrast is mistaken.  
That, I think, is the claim made by Hegel and Marx.  Husserl makes the 
same claim.  The relation of the latter to the former is explored by 
phenomenological Marxists such as Enzo Paci and Karel Kosik.  A key 
feature of the critique is that the idea of reason involved derives 
from a demonstrably mistaken ontology - mechanical materialism.

Ted

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread Shane Mage

Originally Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point - i.e.
the heart has its reasons of which reason doesn't see the relevance or in
which reason sees no point
This is not a correct translation.  The construction  *ne...point*
means not at all, thus much stronger than *ne...pas*, meaning
not.  Pascal is saying the heart has its reasons [ie., the
Roman Catholic Faith] that are completely unknown to our
rational faculties.
accordingly, it is quite wrong to read him as saying

 ...the rational intellect can understand the
reasons of the heart (affective impulses, inclinations, emotions welling
up naturally in the body) but does not admit them as a real factor in
argumentation or rational inference
since our rational faculties can never understand what
is completely unknown to them.
Shane Mage

To be Greek, one must have no clothes.
  To be Medieval, one must have no body.
  To be Modern, one must have no soul (Oscar Wilde)

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread joanna bujes

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point

I think Pascal's assertion has more to do with the limitations of reason than with the powers or nature of the more ambiguous coeur. In other words, it's difficult to say whether by heart Pascal means heart/feeling or heart/love.

I see raisons used metaphorically with respect to the heart -- which is to say that reason is incapable of comprehending these reasons; therefore it can neither admit them or not admit them; they are outside of its domain.

Reason/thought operates in the realm of the past, thought never being able to reach out of the realm of memory, since it _is_ memory in combination with some operational rules: the equal, the more, the less. It is, as ravi argues, basically nothing more than a calculating state machine. Thus reason literally, by definition, cannot know (connaitre = to know) the reasons of the heart. Thought can only know the new in terms of the old and therefore can never know the new. The new (which love does comprehend) can only come into being, can only be apprehended when thought stops. What is then comprehended cannot be rendered either through reason or through language. Wittgenstein too admitted to this limitation.

If you observe, what makes us stale in our relationships is thinking, thinking, thinking, calculating, judging, weighing, adjusting ourselves; and the one thing which frees us from that is love, which is not a process of thought. You cannot think about love. You can think about the person whom you love, but you cannot think about love... We do not know what love is: we know pleasure; we know the lust, the pleasure that is derived from that and the fleeting happiness which is shrouded off with thought, with sorrow. We do not know what to love means. Love is not a memory; love is not a word; love is not the continuity of a thing that has give you pleasure... We know only the love of the brain; thought has produced it, and a product of thought is still thought, it is not love.

Whether Pascal was awake to all this I cannot say; his silly wager and calculating way of getting to God would argue against his being awake to anything much.

Joanna

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread joanna bujes

Agreedand great quote:

To be Greek, one must have no clothes.
 To be Medieval, one must have no body.
 To be Modern, one must have no soul (Oscar Wilde)
Joanna

Shane Mage wrote:
Originally Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point -
i.e.
the heart has its reasons of which reason doesn't see the relevance
or in
which reason sees no point


This is not a correct translation.  The construction  *ne...point*
means not at all, thus much stronger than *ne...pas*, meaning
not.  Pascal is saying the heart has its reasons [ie., the
Roman Catholic Faith] that are completely unknown to our
rational faculties.
accordingly, it is quite wrong to read him as saying

 ...the rational intellect can understand the
reasons of the heart (affective impulses, inclinations, emotions
welling
up naturally in the body) but does not admit them as a real factor in
argumentation or rational inference


since our rational faculties can never understand what
is completely unknown to them.
Shane Mage

To be Greek, one must have no clothes.
  To be Medieval, one must have no body.
  To be Modern, one must have no soul (Oscar Wilde)

Re: Western rationality

Perhaps the idea of reason underpinning this contrast [between ratio and
sentio] is mistaken. That, I think, is the claim made by Hegel and Marx.

But it is not clear what the mistake is. If a doctor is to perform surgery
on a patient, he must separate his feelings from the patient in order to
perform the surgery in some way, and the way in which he does so, is
important. But this way can often be grasped only phenomenologically. But
what are we to say of a media broadcaster, who presents a war against Iraq
as if it is a surgical operation, in other words, applying a postmodernist
metaphor ? This goes beyond phenomenology, because it involves an objective
logic of material interests, and in this case the phenomenology is an
obstruction to really understanding what is happening. What is being
confused and conflated is the social and the individual.

Husserl makes the same claim.  The relation of the latter to the former is
explored by phenomenological Marxists such as Enzo Paci and Karel Kosik.

Yes I read Husserl, and I am quite keen on Kosik, but I never read Enzo
Paci.

A key feature of the critique is that the idea of reason involved derives
from a demonstrably mistaken ontology - mechanical materialism.

Probably true - why I do not associate anymore with most Marxists is because
they misrepresent everything and lie constantly, it's just sexual garbage.
The original counterposition was between mechanical materialism and
religious thought. But Marx's way of solving that counterposition is
mediated by capitalism and his understanding of capitalism. But in fact the
original counterposition has many other aspects, which Marx ignores in his
critique. I am not saying he is personally wrong in ignoring them, but I
think Marxism is wrong, because Marxism is a religion which is inferior to
the religion which already existed, and which it aims to displace, because
that original religion theorised emotion, morality and communality and
Marxism doesn't do that, it assumes that. This would be the main reason why
I reject Marxism and why I am a socialist, despite my strong interest in
Marx's work which causes people to falsely identify me with Marxism.
Socialism allows all those things to be discussed which Marxism violates,
rapes and denies. As a socialist, you have to be constantly on guard against
Marxist scum and liberal-conservative scum who want to rip you off and
defile everything good about human beings, and you have to look very closely
at language to distinguish friend from foe.

J.

Re: Western rationality

Hi Shane,

I agree it is not a correct translation, but literally it would be the
heart has its reasons which reason knows not at all. The question that then
arises is why or how is it possible that reason cannot know this ? This is
the mystique.

Since our rational faculties can never understand what is completely
unknown to them.

Well, a colleague statistician once told me I love my girlfriend, but it is
not rational, but he was a liar and his incongruent behaviour clearly
showed this as well. I had inadvertently wandered into a den of frauds and
whores posing as scientific researchers.

In reality, love is partly rational and partly irrational, but the knowledge
that this is so can also be exploited.

J.

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread Ted Winslow

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:

But it is not clear what the mistake is. If a doctor is to perform
surgery
on a patient, he must separate his feelings from the patient in order
to
perform the surgery in some way, and the way in which he does so, is
important. But this way can often be grasped only phenomenologically.
The feeling that reason is impaired by all feeling may itself be a sign
of such impairment.  Medicine, particularly surgery, is a good example.
 The reasoning it involves may be obsessional and hence a masking to
some degree of irrational hateful, murderous. sadistic feeling - We
murder to dissect.  This can  be consistent with a great deal of
insight, but in so far as it distorts perception it will stand in the
way of a fully rational approach to health and illness. The problem
will be greater, the greater the resulting distortion of the object
requiring to be understood.  There is a Kurosawa movie, Red Beard, that
implicitly makes this point.  Red Beard, a doctor, is portrayed as able
to perceive truly the nature of illness because he is also able to feel
truly.  Among other things, this enables him to sublate the truth
content of western medicine while recognizing its limits.
In Husserl's phenomenology, grasping something phenomenologically means
grasping it without distortion, as it is in itself.
Ted

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread Eubulides

- Original Message -
From: Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 In Husserl's phenomenology, grasping something phenomenologically means
 grasping it without distortion, as it is in itself.

 Ted

==

And then there was Wilfrid Sellars.:-

The quest for *grasping* is a futile one.

Ian

Re: Western rationality

 The feeling that reason is impaired by all feeling may itself be a sign
 of such impairment.

Yes, I think this is the substance of Sabri's critique. Psychologically or
neurologically we may reason from at least four different standpoints:
subjectively, intersubjectively, objectively, and in a reality-transforming
way. But reasoning in an objective way (looking at something as an external
object from the position of an outsider, in a detached or dissociated way)
may involve the dissociation of our affective side, but it may be possible
to achieve objectivity in a horrible situation only via that dissociation,
and that dissociation may be necessary to gain the understanding required to
transform reality into something less horrible.


 In Husserl's phenomenology, grasping something phenomenologically means
 grasping it without distortion, as it is in itself.

Yes, but this notion is highly problematic, since it must ultimately be
based on a subjective perception of one's own ability to grasp something
without distortion, and raises the epistemic question of how we know what
to attribute the perception of distortion to. This is the subject of many
sexual games and innuendo's. It could be that the object of perception is
distorted, or it could be that our perception of it is distorted, and this
can be verified only intersubjectively, or in a reality-transforming way.
But in so doing, it may still not be possible to locate the source of the
perceived distortion, since the perception of distortion irreducibly
involves a value judgement or prioritisation, which distinguishes between
the pure or natural form as a constant, and its variability as its
distortion. Cognitively, it can be proved without any doubt that the mind
spontaneously generates patterns in random displays, and sharpens up
perceived distinctions which are in reality much vaguer than we perceive
them, thus subjectively constructing a degree of order which objectively
isn't really there. Thus grasping something without distortion is in part
a purely subjective judgement, which derives from the search to re-establish
a natural relationship between the individual and the world, which may
also promote a search for order or a compulsion to establish order. Hence,
phenomenology depends almost completely on verbalisation and the ambiguities
it contains, to establish or remove distortions, but the problem here is
that language itself inescapably contains distortions itself, and therefore
renders an undistorted depiction of reality impossible. Hence Marx's
emphasis on a way of knowing which contains a reality-transforming
understanding (the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways, the point is to change it), because it is only such a
reality-transforming understanding which can appropriately place
subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity. That is to say,
phenomenology is itself dependent on a dissociation which problematises
perception of reality as being distorted, but this distortion can only be
overcome practically in a way which goes beyond verbalisation.

In the words of a Dutch pop song, there are no words anymore, no words
anymore, for you, or, in a lyric by George Harrison,

Precious words drift away from their meaning
And the sun melts the chill from our lives
Helping us all to remember what we came here for
This is love, this is la la la-la love

Little things that will change you forever
May appear from way out of the blue
Making fools of ev'rybody who don't understand
This is love, this is la la la-la love

Since our problems have been our own creation
They also can be overcome
When we use the power provided free to everyone
This is love, this is la la la-la love

Jurriaan

Re: Western rationality -reply to Carrol

Carrol wrote:

 the concept of stealing a girlfriend turns the girlfriend into portable
property.

The same applies to men. Indeed, these days a problem for some busy men is
how you can get other men to screw the women under their care. But the
concept of stealing is ill-defined, as shown by the discussion about
intellectual property rights.

 If a person is spied on for the purpose of obtaining information from which
the spy derives income or tangible benefits, this is frequently presented as
benefiting the person being spied on, for example because the person spied
on, is provided with contact opportunities and a network of relations that
could improve his life, a sort of love capitalism which relies on the
sacrifice of personal autonomy for private gain.

In this way, exchange relations invade the communication between the
individual and the world, in a way which allows the appropriation of a
surplus-value, and indeed invade the personal emotional world such that
communications are converted into transactions and the whole living
personality becomes a marketable asset which must be presented in a manner
adequate to its market value.

Thus Michigan psychologist Barbara Frederickson whom I quoted on 4 October
remarks Positive emotions seem to broaden people's repertoires of things
they like to pursue. They broaden ways of thinking beyond our regular
baseline, and they accumulate. The concept of accumulation is easily linked
to the concept of growth, and through this a sexual reference is likewise
easily established, such that self-enrichment and sexual relations become
synonymous. But having accumulated cash through all sorts of new relations,
the individual not infrequently uses the cash only to shut himself off from
the external world as much as possible.

Jurriaan

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-11 Thread Yoshie Furuhashi

At 8:29 PM +0100 11/11/03, Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
I agree it is not a correct translation, but literally it would be the
heart has its reasons which reason knows not at all. The question that then
arises is why or how is it possible that reason cannot know this?
If the Roman Catholic faith is incomprehensible to reason, that's not
reason's fault.  :-
--
Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html,
http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php,  http://www.cpanews.org/
* Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/
* Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio
* Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/

Re: Western rationality

 If the Roman Catholic faith is incomprehensible to reason, that's not
 reason's fault.  :-

Imagine there's no heaving,
It ain't easy if we lie,
No Shell below us,
Above us only why,
Imagine all the pee pals
Shifting for a day ...
Imagine there's no countries,
It's pretty hard to do,
No thing to kill or die for,
No oblivion too,
Imagine all the steeples,
Living life in peace ...
Imagine no more capitalism,
I'm thinking that we can,
No need for greed or longer,
A brotherhood and sisterhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world ...
You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not your only one,
I hope some day we'll join up,
And the world will live as one.

4) Your abolition of the imagined object, of the object as object of
consciousness, is identified with the real objective abolition, with
sensuous action, practice and real activity as distinct from thinking. (Has
still to be developed.)

Karl Marx, Hegel's Construction of the Phenomenology. Source:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/11/phenom.htm

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-10 Thread Jurriaan Bendien

No, you already won, you've got the spouse, I haven't. I am not trying to be
competitive with you, as far as I am concerned, you're a friend of mine. It
is just that the notion of Western rationality gets pressed into the service
of the foreign policy of many a Western country, and therefore, we ought to
take it seriously, because the so-called rationality which people try to
impose on foreigners might only just be a self-serving logic. Winning
arguments is only an aim if it's against the political opposition. But let's
not get confused about whose side we are on.

Jurriaan

Re: western rationality

2003-11-10 Thread Sabri Oncu

Jurriaan:

 Winning arguments is only an aim if it's against the
 political opposition. But let's not get confused about
 whose side we are on.

I second that.

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-10 Thread ravi

Sabri Oncu wrote:

 Hey! This is not an insult but a great praise. I take pride in
 being irrational. I don't think heart and reason are separable.



but then, 'the heart has its reasons, that reason does not know'!

--ravi

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-10 Thread Jurriaan Bendien

 but then, 'the heart has its reasons, that reason does not know'!

I think it is in reality more like, 'the heart has its reasons, that reason
does not admit'.

J.

Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread Kenneth Campbell

Hi Sabri --

I didn't respond to this because I wanted to give it a lot of thought.
And try to separate out layers of influence in my own opinions. Maybe
I've just been westernized as you sort of imply.

(Plus, Jurriaan did a rather good job in dealing with the concept of
western rationality as a phantom entity.)

You wrote:

As I told Jurriaan once in private, in my view, western
rationality is about horse trading, since it reduces human
interactions to deals and bargaining. When you adhere to western
rationality, you design mechanisms to induce others to do what
you want them to do, if you can, of course.

This is why western rationality requires Justins.

If I follow your example, it produces Justins.

(Sorry, Justin, to make you an abstract entity.)

But I cannot see what the alternative is. That's my conclusion, after
this time.

If you have an idea of what the non-western method of resolving disputes
is, I'd like to hear it. (ADR is included in western dispute
mechanisms.)

The western idea is that individuals make up the aggregate group.
Majority v Minority dynamics. The individuals have individual rights
against the aggregate group rights. And a truly democratic society is
one which respects the minority. The individual.

What is wrong with that?

Each informs the other: the individual learns from the group, and the
group learns from the individual.

But that will always be there, regardless of the property relations. I'm
not sure it's western.

I cannot imagine a world (and thus it may be my failing, as I cannot
imagine it) in which horsetrading is not part of life.

I horsetrade all the time. I do with Michael P., Ian M., Joanna B., Doug
H., and you. We find common ground. And, if we are considerate of each
other's dignity, we curb ourselves a bit.

What Marx and socialists and whatever have gone on about is that the
horsetrading that is purported to be fair... is an unbelievably crooked
game. And they all marvel at that fact. (How can so many people not see
that they are losing their own rights to privacy and economic security
because they accept their fate?)

My Irish philosopher friend James Daly has a book entitled
Deals and Ideals and there he calls what I call western
rationality the Anglo-French version of Enlightenment.

Welll... I'm not overly impressed with James Daly. He strikes me as
a bit of an over-emotional person.

Ken.

--
All politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another,
and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of
amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to
bring a Rust upon Men's Understanding.
  -- Anthony Ashley Cooper
 Third Earl of Shaftesbury
 (1671-1713)

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread joanna bujes

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:

However, once it is admitted that human
beings are part of the material world and connected with it all the time
through conscious practical activity, most philosophical problems about our
ability to know the world disappear and become practical, experiential
questions. But if the same dualism persists all the same, it is purely for
social-structural reasons, because in a competitive, class-divided market
society, one isn't really able to fully reconcile the individual reality
with social reality, even when we conscientiously try with the best means of
communication at our disposal.
That was beautifully and clearly said...

Joanna

Re: Western rationality

 That was beautifully and clearly said...

Well thanks. In Britain or California they can always say it so much better
than I can, I mean, I can think it but I might not be able to say it, that
was a problem all my life really. But I am working on it. When language gets
hard, I know I've got problems, in a manner of speaking :-) You could sit
there designing survey questionnaires for the government and think you are
doing okay, but a bimbo attack might throw you off-centre anyhow.

J.

Re: Western rationality

Jurriaan:

 I think what Sabri really has in mind by Western
 rationality is the dualism and fetishes generated
 by commercial activity, but Ibn Khaldun already
 described that these processes were also occurring
 in the East.

Ken and Jurriaan,

I don't have the time to respond to this at length because of
these bloody homework assignments. I have forgoten what sleeping
well meant since the beginning of this quarter. But let me say
this: I never claimed that western rationality is a western
phenomenon. I use it as a name only. And at times I use it
intentionally to give the word western a derogatory meaning to
take revenge from you westerners. Any objections to that?

Back to work, that is, homework and I tell you, you don't want to
do this at my age.


Sabri

Re: Western rationality

Sabri wrote:

I never claimed that western rationality is a western
 phenomenon. I use it as a name only. And at times I use it
 intentionally to give the word western a derogatory meaning to
 take revenge from you westerners. Any objections to that?

No objections, go ahead, it's just that you live further West than me, and I
lived half my life in New Zealand, so what the hell you are talking about
with your revenge doesn't make sense to me. A Turkish guy I lived with in
New Zealand later accused me of trying to steal his girlfriend but it was
bullshit, she didn't even fancy me either. So before we get too hot under
the collar, let's get back to our homework.

J.

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread joanna bujes

Sabri Oncu wrote:

Back to work, that is, homework and I tell you, you don't want to
do this at my age.
Yeah, work is bad enoughbut at least there, I can slog through it
while repeating to myself: I get paid $$/hour to do this; I get paid
$$/hour to do this; Hard to do that in school. By the end of my
grad school career (at U.C. Berkeley), I got so tired of the crap that I
actually got a Fail in a Theory of Composition class (Incomplete
lapsed to a Fail) because of getting into a fight with the venerable
professor. I was pissed and I simply no longer gave a damn.
Joanna

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread andie nachgeborenen

. I never claimed that western rationality is
 a western
 phenomenon. I use it as a name only. And at times I
 use it
 intentionally to give the word western a
 derogatory meaning to
 take revenge from you westerners. Any objections to
 that?


Sure, all you Orientals are irrational, we wouldn't
expect anything better.

jks

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Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread Devine, James

why don't we call it capitalist rationality?
JD

-Original Message- 
From: Sabri Oncu [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Sun 11/9/2003 12:03 PM 
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Cc: 
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Western rationality

Jurriaan:

 I think what Sabri really has in mind by Western
 rationality is the dualism and fetishes generated
 by commercial activity, but Ibn Khaldun already
 described that these processes were also occurring
 in the East.

Ken and Jurriaan,

I don't have the time to respond to this at length because of
these bloody homework assignments. I have forgoten what sleeping
well meant since the beginning of this quarter. But let me say
this: I never claimed that western rationality is a western
phenomenon. I use it as a name only. And at times I use it
intentionally to give the word western a derogatory meaning to
take revenge from you westerners. Any objections to that?

Back to work, that is, homework and I tell you, you don't want to
do this at my age.

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

 why don't we call it capitalist rationality?
 JD

Well as you know, I never disagree with you.

J.

Re: Western rationality

 that is rational, in a western way. ;-)

Some people get a cheap laugh breaking up the speed limit
Scaring the pedestrians for a minute
Crossing up progress driving on the grass
Leaving just enough for room to pass
Sunday driver never took a test
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west

Yes, it's no use saying that you don't know nothing
It's still gonna get you if don't do something
Sitting on a fence that's a dangerous course
Oh, you could even catch a bullet from the peace - keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west

Mother Mary your children are slaughtered
Some of you mothers ought to lock up your daughters
Who's protecting the innocenti
Heap big trouble in the land of plenty
Tell me how we're gonna do what's best
You guess once upon a time in the west

Once upon a time in the west...

 (is western rationality like a western saddle?)

Not anymore these days, although I quite like some of those Western saddles.
But have you ever seen a classic Spanish stirrup ? :)

J.

Re: Western rationality

 Sure, all you Orientals are irrational, we wouldn't
 expect anything better.

 jks

Hey! This is not an insult but a great praise. I take pride in
being irrational. I don't think heart and reason are separable.
By the way, jks's reaction also demonstrates how good I am at
touching the peoples feelings. You felt offended, didn't you?
Just think about how we have felt over many centuries.

I strongly suggest reading some of Kahneman's work on
rationality. I really like his contributions although he got
carried away at times and overdid it.

Irrationally yours,

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

- Paul Valery

Re: Western rationality

Ken:

 I had originally thought it was about the proportion
 of onion, green pepper and ham in an omelets.

What you originally thought was right. It doesn't have anything
to do with east or west but as I said in my previous post, it is
about that heart and mind are not separable. In reason there are
emotions and in emotions there is reason. Put differently, Marx
and Yunus are not opposites but one and the same.

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

Jurriaan:

 A Turkish guy I lived with in New Zealand later
 accused me of trying to steal his girlfriend but
 it was bullshit, she didn't even fancy me either.

Hey! I don't know about other Turkish guys but most of the time I
had been the one who was accused of trying to steal other guys'
girlfriends. Those girlfriends usually fancied me without me
doing anything about it but I never ever stole girlfriends of
other people. I just cannot do it. My irrational heart doesn't
allow me to do that.

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread Carrol Cox

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
 
  Hey! I don't know about other Turkish guys but most of the time I
  had been the one who was accused of trying to steal other guys'
  girlfriends. Those girlfriends usually fancied me without me
  doing anything about it but I never ever stole girlfriends of
  other people. I just cannot do it. My irrational heart doesn't
  allow me to do that.
 
 Or maybe ire-rational ? I haven't done it either, not wittingly anyway, but
 I could imagine that in certain situations having a heart could lead to that
 situation.

Ahem. From the OED

   I. To take dishonestly or secretly.

1. a. trans. To take away dishonestly (portable property, cattle,
etc., belonging to another); esp. to do this secretly or unobserved by
the owner or the person in charge. Const. from (earlier dat.).
 
 The notion of secrecy (cf. STEALTH) seems to be part of the original
meaning of the vb., which, however, is also employed in a generic sense
applicable to open as well as secret acts of theft. In mod. use it takes
the place of REAVE v.1 5, ROB v. 5, and of combinations like to steal
and reave.

Other uses are derivative or figurative. The core here is the concept of
_portable PROPERTY_. That is, the concept of stealing a girlfriend
turns the girlfriend into portable property.

:-)

Carrol

Re: Western rationality

Jurriaan:

 Or maybe ire-rational ? I haven't done it either, not
 wittingly anyway, but I could imagine that in certain
 situations having a heart could lead to that situation. I am
 not saying all Turkish guys are alike, because they aren't,
 I am just saying I have known them to jump to conclusions, and
 if you are going to have your Turkish revenge against Western
 rationality I think you are jumping to conclusions.

Look Jurriaan,

You are demonstrating a westernly rational behaviour. You are
playing this game to win. That is, with your arguments and
reason, you are trying to defeat me in front of other people.

Why? What drives you to do that? Could that be your emotions more
than anything?

Also, I have no intention to take revenge from western
rationality, which I don't think meaninful because it is a
theoretical construct which we never see in real human decision
making, at least, as it is normatively defined.

Also, I never said that I want to take revenge from western
rationality. I just said that I use the word western (not
western rationality) to give it a deragotory meaning to take
revenge from you westerners. Had I put these two words in quotes,
that is, written deragotory and revenge, may be none of this
would have happened, since you would have realized that being my
usual self I was just joking. But my spouse always tells me that
behind every joke there are real reasons and I plead guilty for
that.

And here, I accept defeat. You won, I lost.

Are you happy now?

Best,

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread Kenneth Campbell

All Right!

Sabri writes, progressively:

You are demonstrating a westernly rational behaviour.

It is slipping from an adjective to... well... a lesser adjective. Not
western now westernly.

Soon it will be a not eastern.

Also, I never said that I want to take revenge from western
rationality.

No you didn't. I did.

And I was kidding.

Ken.

--
The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all
the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may
shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may
enter, the rain may enter, - but the King of England
cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the
threshold of the ruined tenement!
  -- William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (17081778)
 Speech on the Excise Bill

Re: Western rationality

Ken:

 It is slipping from an adjective to... well... a
 lesser adjective. Not western now westernly.

What was I supposed to write Ken in order not to slip to a lesser
adjective?

Western rationally behaviour? Westeronoid rational behaviour?
Western rationalesque behaviour? Or would it have been better
if I said western rational behaviour?

You tell me.

Best,

Sabri

Re: Western rationality

2003-11-09 Thread Kenneth Campbell

I like this one:

Westeronoid rational behaviour?

After that, you can loot the fucking tradition. :)

Ken.

--
Fall out of the window with confetti in my hair.
  -- Tom Waits

Western rationality ?

2003-11-02 Thread Jurriaan Bendien

Hi Sabri,

I think I know where you are coming from.

 As I told Jurriaan once in private, in my view, western
 rationality is about horse trading, since it reduces human
 interactions to deals and bargaining. When you adhere to western
 rationality, you design mechanisms to induce others to do what
 you want them to do, if you can, of course.

Yes, we discussed this a bit off-list, but as you know I disagree. I cannot
give all the arguments now, but let's just make ten quick points:

1) The West does not exist culturally, it is an ideological fiction or
geographic reference, an ideological concept which hides the reality of
imperialist accumulation. In order to understand this, you should study the
history of geographical mapping, the production of geographical maps. Then
you will see the West is an ideological fiction.
2) Western rationality is a Weberian ideal type and not an objective
reality, which suffers from the pitfalls of all ideal types - the use of
ideal types, insofar as they have a use, is in a different area, in
socialist politics.
3) Western Rationality contains many different forms of reasoning and
values, and does not lead to just one style of behaviour, in other words it
covers a host of sins and scientific advances, some of which socialists
ought to defend, others to discard.
4) Capitalist markets, as Marx explains, have an objective, mind-independent
logic of its own, to which we choose to conform or not to conform, but, and
this is the crux of it, the fact that we may be forced to conform to it, to
obtain access to goods and services, in other words behind the realm of
choice is the real of necessity, we have to adjust our behaviour to market
forces in accordance with the operation of the law of value, which makes
sale at price of production the basic condition of supply and access to
goods and services.
5) Ibn Khaldun indicates how Arab mercantile capitalism features
sophisticated market rationality, but it is not clear how this market
rationality is substantively different from your Western rationality,
other than Islamic banks etc. and other than that specific terms of exchange
are institutionalised with different ethical norms. People might thing in a
different way about capital accumulation, but they accumulation capital
nevertheless, and if Eastern rationality hinders that accumulation, they
will drop it.
6) Marx explains that the bourgeois modes of production are not dependent on
any particular culture, any ethnicity or form of reasoning - such culture,
ethnicity or forms of reasoning may certainly prove to be a gigantic
obstacle to primitive accumulation, insofar as they achieve social cohesion
and satisfaction of needs on the basis of a principle of social order or
institutionalised social relations which are incompatible with bourgeois
private property relations, but primitive accumulation through privatisation
can always be achieved through asserting violence and raping, the laws of
motion of capitalism working themselves out with iron necessity towards
inevitable results through military accumulation.
7) If we were to argue that there is Western rationality then we confront
the problem that parts of mathematics for example originates from the East
(cf. e.g. Dirk Struik, A History of Mathematics - which provides a Marxian
interpretation) and thus also that many forms of reasoning, communication
and symbolisation used in the West did not originate in the West, but were
part of imperialist appropriation from elsewhere or originated through
legitimate international trade.
8) If we were to spell out very rigorously the difference between Western
rationality and Eastern rationality then we would conclude there is no
difference in substantive method, only a difference in the relative value
attached to different forms of reasoning used to guide behaviour, determined
by anatomical and cultural differences; but through the operation of the
laws of motion of capitalism, the effect of these differences is gradually
cancelled out and all different rationalities are subsumed under the logic
of Capital, because the ultimately market leaves no space for any other
logic than market logic, i.e. all use-value must be restructured to conform
to exchange-value (see 6). Globalisation concepts and globalism are tools
for imposing market logic.
9) If Western rationality is just Western, then it is difficult to explain
why Eastern peoples actually adopt it and use it, and how they can use it,
because if their reasoning was radically different, then Western rationality
would be incommensurate with Eastern rationality.
10) Insofar as ethnic differences in rationality are different, the
differences are ultimately not very great and more a question of
problem-solving style, and emphasising different problem-solving styles and
thus differentiating between people may only be due to a sectional interest.

In reflecting on these issues, Karl Marx remarks significantly, where the
ideologist sees a unity

Re: Western rationality ?

2003-11-02 Thread Michael Hoover

 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 11/02/03 8:37 AM 
1) The West does not exist culturally, it is an ideological fiction or
geographic reference, an ideological concept which hides the reality of
imperialist accumulation. In order to understand this, you should study
the history of geographical mapping, the production of geographical
maps. Then you will see the West is an ideological fiction.
Jurriaan


much as the term 'euro-centric' is problematic (although i agree with
the late geographer Jim Blaut that the concept is the 'colonizer's model
of the world'), certain applications of the term/concept 'west' flattens
the complexity of European/western culture and history's peripheral
regions, social classes, and marginalized and stigmatized peoples...
michael hoover

Western Rationality

2003-03-31 Thread Sabri Oncu

As you may remember, I had kept bringing this over and over. To
better understand what I meant, just look at the peoples of Iraq.
Their behavior is hardly westernly rational. No Von
Neuman-Morgenstein utility function can explain their behavior
and their strategy is definitely not a Nash equilibrium strategy.

This is why Game Theory, Contract Theory and all that are
garbage.

Sabri

Re: Western Rationality

2003-03-31 Thread joanna bujes

You're talking waaay over my head. They're defending their country against 
a foreign aggressor. As one Iraqui man put it We can't take this colonial 
stuff anymore.

The pundits may need jargon; do we? What the Iraquis are doing seems 
absolutely rational as was the behavior of the Russians at Stalingrad.

Joanna

At 11:19 AM 03/31/2003 -0800, you wrote:
As you may remember, I had kept bringing this over and over. To
better understand what I meant, just look at the peoples of Iraq.
Their behavior is hardly westernly rational. No Von
Neuman-Morgenstein utility function can explain their behavior
and their strategy is definitely not a Nash equilibrium strategy.
This is why Game Theory, Contract Theory and all that are
garbage.
Sabri

Re: Western Rationality

2003-03-31 Thread Sabri Oncu

 You're talking waaay over my head. They're defending
 their country against a foreign aggressor. As one
 Iraqui man put it We can't take this colonial stuff
 anymore.

 The pundits may need jargon; do we? What the Iraquis
 are doing seems absolutely rational as was the behavior
 of the Russians at Stalingrad.

 Joanna

My sincere apologies Joanna. My knowledge of these topics is not
that deep either. I just pay attention to some of the equations
in those scientific books and papers every once in a while.
That is all.

What I was trying to say, among other things, was that I object
to that jargon. I just did not know how to say it without using
some of it.

My apologies again,

Sabri

Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-14 Thread Yoshie Furuhashi


At 8:01 PM -0700 10/13/02, Sabri Oncu wrote:
   I should reiterate that the reason why western rationality
   is in quotation marks is because it is not the same thing as
   scientific thinking.

Exactly. This is why I had western rationality in quotation
marks in my post that started this discussion.

As should be obvious that my objection to western rationality
is because, unlike it claims, one cannot arbitrarily pick any two
members of a universal set and then attempt to compare them. Two
members of a universal set are comparable only if they belong to
the same equivalence class. Unfortunatelly, this is a logical
mistake I observe in many debates, online or otherwise.

Here is a question:

Who defines these equivalence classes, that is, who defines the
order relation that partially orders the universal set?

To put it differently, is there a unique order relation that
partially orders the universal set?

Money.
-- 
Yoshie

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Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-14 Thread joanna bujes


At 08:01 PM 10/13/2002 -0700, you wrote:
To put it differently, is there a unique order relation that
partially orders the universal set?

Yes. They call it Nature. And, as Aristotle said, Nature IS order.

The guiding question in science has been How do you read/interpret that 
order? The answer that most satisfies Western science is that you read it 
quantitatively and mathematically. I would argue that this mathematical 
reading has delivered some useful, but many partial results. The biggest 
problem is that the mathematics (and the science it leads to) have been 
posited as a superset that includes nature. Why that happened is a long 
story, but it did happen.

Concepts of context and relation are much more difficult to handle and are 
only now being introduced into Science -- through the more politically 
charged fields of ecology (for example). I don't expect much more 
development in this area though because capitalism is interested in results 
and takes up mostly the development of a science it can ultimately own. So, 
we'll have to wait for better times for Science to grow into an art of 
observation and attention that does not limit itself to mathematical 
models and that can handle context/relation better than it can now.

Joanna

Joanna

RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-14 Thread Sabri Oncu


Joanna wrote:

 To put it differently, is there a unique order relation
 that partially orders the universal set?

 Yes. They call it Nature. And, as Aristotle said, Nature
 IS order.

No objection to that Joanna, nor to almost anything else you
said. But, yours is a different concept of order. I believe one
other reason why we see this many endless debates with no
conclusion in the end is that different people use a given word
to mean different things. That means we seem to suffer from some
sort of a communication breakdown, at least, from time to time.

Hence, I very much agree with this argument of yours:

 Concepts of context and relation are much more difficult
 to handle  ...

as well as, with the rest of it:

 ...  and are only now being introduced into Science
 -- through the more politically charged fields of ecology
 (for example). I don't expect much more development in this
 area though because capitalism is interested in results
 and takes up mostly the development of a science it can
 ultimately own.

And this is the thing that I object to:

 So, we'll have to wait for better times for Science to grow
 into an art of observation and attention that does not limit
 itself to mathematical models and that can handle
 context/relation better than it can now.

I say, why wait? Let us start working on it now.

Best,

Sabri

Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-14 Thread Sabri Oncu


To put it differently, is there a unique order relation that
partially orders the universal set?

Money.
--
Yoshie



Now Yoshie, I will show that you are wrong by establishing a
contradiction:

Clearly, money defines an order relation that partially orders
the universal set. Suppose now that this order relation is
unique. It then follows immediately that PEN-L does not exist,
which is a contradiction. Hence, there does not exist a unique
order relation that partially orders the universal set.

Jim, how do you like my rationality?

Best,

Sabri

Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-14 Thread Charles Jannuzi



--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
 At 08:01 PM 10/13/2002 -0700, you wrote:
 To put it differently, is there a unique order
 relation that
 partially orders the universal set?
 
 Yes. They call it Nature. And, as Aristotle
 said, Nature IS order.
 
 The guiding question in science has been How
 do you read/interpret that 
 order? The answer that most satisfies Western
 science is that you read it 
 quantitatively and mathematically. I would
 argue that this mathematical 
 reading has delivered some useful, but many
 partial results. The biggest 
 problem is that the mathematics (and the
 science it leads to) have been 
 posited as a superset that includes nature. Why
 that happened is a long 
 story, but it did happen.

And the Greeks did not say that nature's limits
could not be crossed; rather, they said that IF
those limits were crossed, the gods would strike
the violator down.

A perfect way to view the coming ecological
crises, if you ask me.

CJannuzi

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Re: Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread Carl Remick


From: Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED]

... (western) rationality is that human behaviour,
possibly emerged in Europe some centuries ago, which attemps to
impose a complete order on an infinite dimensional set, that is,
a continuum, that I call life. Life as a continuum can at best be
a partially ordered, if that, at least, to my experience. Hence,
western rationality, as a form of human behaviour, is
unreasonable and, therefore, illogical.

Well put.  The extreme selectivity in fact-finding that forms the basis of 
western rationality provides a very distorted picture of reality and tends 
to subjugate, not liberate, the human spirit.

Carl

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Re: Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread joanna bujes


At 03:47 AM 10/12/2002 +, you wrote:
The sheer complexity of modern technologies requires that RD be a team 
effort; no one individual acting alone can supply the expertise needed to 
advance the state of the art.  If you have a team effort, you need 
administrators to coordinate efforts, allocate resources, etc.

You need administrative/coordinating functions; but these don't necessarily 
have to become the domain of professional administrators. On the whole, 
workers are much savvier about how to coordinate/administrate their work 
than administrators. At least, i find this to be so in the software business.

Joanna

Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread Charles Jannuzi



--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
 At 03:47 AM 10/12/2002 +, you wrote:
 The sheer complexity of modern technologies
 requires that RD be a team 
 effort; no one individual acting alone can
 supply the expertise needed to 
 advance the state of the art.  If you have a
 team effort, you need 
 administrators to coordinate efforts, allocate
 resources, etc.
 
 You need administrative/coordinating functions;
 but these don't necessarily 
 have to become the domain of professional
 administrators. On the whole, 
 workers are much savvier about how to
 coordinate/administrate their work 
 than administrators. At least, i find this to
 be so in the software business.
 
 Joanna
 

It's the same in the military, where senior
enlisted really make the administrative,
managerial officers look good (or bad, as on one
ship where, after the officers accused NCOs and
lower enlisted , wrongly, of sabotaging
equipment--the problem was missed maintenance
intervals that officers supervised and faulty
equipment--the enlisted decided not to find any
Soviet subs for a while). 

I suspect it is true everywhere. I do see how the
Japanese companies integrate assembly line with
office work--for example, office workers
participating in quality control circles at the
factory next to the office building. But in the
new new economy, most Americans say about the
Japanese: they work hard and are still good at
making things. But Americans are a separate class
meant to control the world, right? (I guess that
managerial obliviousness equals moral certitude.)

C. Jannuzi

   


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RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread Devine, James

Title: RE: [PEN-L:31300] Western Rationality

I wrote:if enlightenment comes only from within, then there's no way to
convince anyone else of the validity of your enlightenment. It's like those religious people who say you have to Believe to understand. Well, I don't believe, so I'll just put your religion on the shelf next to astrology.

Carl writes: The crowning irony is that belief in science *is* a religion, in effect if not design. Lay people usually aren't competent to decide whether scientists have provided adequate proof for their arguments, and they're almost invariably unable to make reasoned assessments of disputes between scientists. For most people, scientific pronouncements aren't at all illuminating but are as arbitary, opaque and mystifying as priestly decrees of ancient times.

This seems to be a willful misunderstanding of what I have said. But no matter.

I would agree that science _can be_ a religion. That's what I and many others call scientism. It is rejected by progressive scientists such as Richard Lewontin and others I've mentioned.

The fact is that lay people can become competent to deal with scientists. To think that they can't do so is to accept the scientistic belief that science is a religion. One of the things that the old social-democratic, socialist, and communist movements did was to educate working people so that they could deal with scientists in a more egalitarian way.

Further, scientific pronouncements can be opaque, but scientists can and should try to make them in lay language (as with the movement to make lawyers do so).

There's been a (perhaps minor insufficient) change that indicates what could happen in the future. It used to be that medical doctors acted as if they were minor gods, ignoring the wishes, questions, and emotions of the patients. Nowadays, more and more, at least in the U.S., the relationship between MDs and patients is more equal, with more two-way conversation. Medical schools are training MDs to accept this and be able to do it. Unfortunately, the HMOs encourage the opposite. But we can't take negative results as inevitable.

Historian Carl Becker made this argument many years ago, as I recall, in his essay The Heavenly City of 18th Century Philosophers -- i.e., that the Enlightenment has not proved very enlightening. Sure, people enjoy all the material benefits that modern technology produces, but they don't have a clue how this technology actually works; it might as well

be magic. This remains very much the age of belief, not the age of reason.

Carl, you seem to consistently merge science in general with science as practiced in the Enlightenment/Modernist way. But the Enlightenment only had a false claim to rationality. It was progressive in the fight against feudal obscurantism, but this aspect of Enlightenment thinking has become irrelevant as feudalism has gone away.

Sabri clarifies this point:To me, reason is that power of the mind to understand the world, and as such, it is universal to us all. And logic is that method of reasoning that is employed by all in our planet, more or less, also universally.

right.

On the other hand, (western) rationality is that human behaviour, possibly emerged in Europe some centuries ago, which attemps to impose a complete order on an infinite dimensional set, that is, a continuum, that I call life. Life as a continuum can at best be a partially ordered, if that, at least, to my experience. Hence, western rationality, as a form of human behaviour, is unreasonable and, therefore, illogical. It is like trying to order Paul Desmond's Take Five and Dede Efendi's Rast Kar-i

Natik in some way. Although they are both musical monuments, at least, to my liking, they don't belong to the same equivalence set, and hence, there is no way to compare one against the other.

It is a mistake, as the Enlightenment and Carl do, to equate the one-size-fits-all Tayloristic science of the Enlightenment, with rationality.

Lewontin and Levins (in their DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST) argue against the Enlightenment version of science. They see the world as heterogeneous, involving a large number of parts that are interconnected as part of a whole that feeds back to affect the character of the parts, and as dynamic. The Enlightenment science is akin to dissection: in this view, we can only understand an organism by cutting it up into bits -- killing it. This destroys the dynamism and the holism. Enlightenment science also attempts to get rid of real-world heterogeneity, escaping into abstraction.

RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread Devine, James

Title: RE: Western Rationality

[By mistake, I sent this before I was finished. Please reply to this one.]

I wrote:if enlightenment comes only from within, then there's no way
to
convince anyone else of the validity of your enlightenment. It's like
those religious people who say you have to Believe to understand.
Well, I don't believe, so I'll just put your religion on the shelf next
to astrology.

Carl writes: The crowning irony is that belief in science *is* a
religion, in effect if not design. Lay people usually aren't competent
to decide whether scientists have provided adequate proof for their
arguments, and they're almost invariably unable to make reasoned
assessments of disputes between scientists. For most people, scientific
pronouncements aren't at all illuminating but are as arbitary, opaque
and mystifying as priestly decrees of ancient times.

This seems to be a willful misunderstanding of what I have said. But no
matter.

I would agree that science _can be_ a religion. That's what I and many
others call scientism. It is rejected by progressive scientists such
as Richard Lewontin and others I've mentioned.

The fact is that lay people can become competent to deal with
scientists. To think that they can't do so is to accept the scientistic
belief that science is a religion. One of the things that the old
social-democratic, socialist, and communist movements did was to educate
working people so that they could deal with scientists in a more
egalitarian way.

Further, scientific pronouncements can be opaque, but scientists can and
should try to make them in lay language (as with the movement to make
lawyers do so).

There's been a (perhaps minor insufficient) change that indicates what
could happen in the future. It used to be that medical doctors acted as
if they were minor gods, ignoring the wishes, questions, and emotions of
the patients. Nowadays, more and more, at least in the U.S., the
relationship between MDs and patients is more equal, with more two-way
conversation. Medical schools are training MDs to accept this and be
able to do it. Unfortunately, the HMOs encourage the opposite. But we
can't take negative results as inevitable.

Historian Carl Becker made this argument many years ago, as I recall,
in his essay The Heavenly City of 18th Century Philosophers -- i.e.,
that the Enlightenment has not proved very enlightening. Sure, people
enjoy all the material benefits that modern technology produces, but
they don't have a clue how this technology actually works; it might as
well be magic. This remains very much the age of belief, not the age of
reason.

Carl, you seem to consistently merge science in general with science
as practiced in the Enlightenment/Modernist way. But the Enlightenment
only had a false claim to rationality. It was progressive in the fight
against feudal obscurantism, but this aspect of Enlightenment thinking
has become irrelevant as feudalism has gone away.

Sabri clarifies this point:To me, reason is that power of the mind to
understand the world, and as such, it is universal to us all. And logic
is that method of reasoning that is employed by all in our planet, more
or less, also universally.

right.

On the other hand, (western) rationality is that human behaviour,
possibly emerged in Europe some centuries ago, which attemps to impose a
complete order on an infinite dimensional set, that is, a continuum,
that I call life. Life as a continuum can at best be a partially
ordered, if that, at least, to my experience. Hence, western
rationality, as a form of human behaviour, is unreasonable and,
therefore, illogical. It is like trying to order Paul Desmond's Take
Five and Dede Efendi's Rast Kar-i Natik in some way. Although they are both musical monuments, at least, to my liking, they don't belong to the same equivalence set, and hence, there is no way to compare one against the other.

It is a mistake, as the Enlightenment and Carl do, to equate the
one-size-fits-all Tayloristic science of the Enlightenment, with
rationality.

Lewontin and Levins (in their DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST) argue against the
Enlightenment version of science. They see the world as heterogeneous,
involving a large number of parts that are interconnected as part of a
whole that feeds back to affect the character of the parts, and as
dynamic. The Enlightenment science is akin to dissection: in this
view, we can only understand an organism by cutting it up into bits --
killing it. This destroys the dynamism and the holism. Enlightenment
science also attempts to get rid of real-world heterogeneity, escaping
into abstraction.

In response to Sabri, Carl writes:Well put. The extreme selectivity in fact-finding that forms the basis of western rationality provides a very distorted picture of reality and tends to subjugate, not liberate, the human spirit.

I should reiterate that the reason why western rationality is in quotation marks is because it is not the same thing

Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread Ian Murray


RE: [PEN-L:31300] Western Rationality
- Original Message -
From: Devine, James

Lewontin and Levins (in their DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST) argue against the
Enlightenment version of science. They see the world as heterogeneous,
involving a large number of parts that are interconnected as part of a whole
that feeds back to affect the character of the parts, and as dynamic. The
Enlightenment science is akin to dissection: in this view, we can only
understand an organism by cutting it up into bits -- killing it. This
destroys the dynamism and the holism. Enlightenment science also attempts
to get rid of real-world heterogeneity, escaping into abstraction.

=

By the same token, anti-reductionism aside, the aggregation-holism issue in
ecology and physiology makes the problem of 'the aggregate production
function' look like kid stuff...Where/when to 'draw' those damn
boundaries!

Ian

RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-13 Thread Sabri Oncu


Jim wrote:

 I should reiterate that the reason why western rationality
 is in quotation marks is because it is not the same thing as
 scientific thinking.

Exactly. This is why I had western rationality in quotation
marks in my post that started this discussion.

As should be obvious that my objection to western rationality
is because, unlike it claims, one cannot arbitrarily pick any two
members of a universal set and then attempt to compare them. Two
members of a universal set are comparable only if they belong to
the same equivalence class. Unfortunatelly, this is a logical
mistake I observe in many debates, online or otherwise.

Here is a question:

Who defines these equivalence classes, that is, who defines the
order relation that partially orders the universal set?

To put it differently, is there a unique order relation that
partially orders the universal set?

Best,

Sabri

RE: Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-12 Thread Devine, James

Title: RE: [PEN-L:31287] Re: RE: Western Rationality

I wrote: I don't understand why scientific (consistent logical empirical) thinking _requires_ division of labor, bureaucratization, and the rest. Please explain.

Carl: The sheer complexity of modern technologies requires that RD be a team effort; no one individual acting alone can supply the expertise needed to advance the state of the art. If you have a team effort, you need administrators to coordinate efforts, allocate resources, etc.

team efforts do not require excessive specialization. In fact, successful cooperation requires communication, which is made more difficult to the extent that over-specialization prevails (as when sociologists can't talk to econmists and _vice versa_).

It's wrong to assume that bureaucracy is needed simply because it prevails under capitalism and Actually was-Existing Socialism. Scientific teams could be organized in more democratic ways, while the allocation of resources (by governments, etc.) could also be done democratically. The Weberian Iron Cage can be combatted.

If we can succeed in the struggle against bureaucratic (top-down) rule, then we can get away from excessive specialization. It would liberate science, helping it to further liberate society.

Further, is there any way to convince anyone of the validity of your
vision except in a (social) scientific way?

Ah! I think enlightenment comes from within, not from any evidence the
social sciences can produce. But that's just me channeling R. W.
Emerson again.

if enlightenment comes only from within, then there's no way to convince anyone else of the validity of your enlightenment. It's like those religious people who say you have to Believe to understand. Well, I don't believe, so I'll just put your religion on the shelf next to astrology.

if enlightenment comes not only from within but from empirical research, rationally considered, then we have room for discussion. But the possibility of coming to a consensus about what's true and what's not comes not from the inner enlightenment but from logical and empirical dialogue.

Jim

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden

...

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what's real and what is not
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden
-- Bob Dylan, Gates of Eden.

Re: RE: Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-12 Thread Ian Murray

RE: [PEN-L:31287] Re: RE: Western Rationality
- Original Message - 
From: Devine, James 
 
Relationships of ownership 
They whisper in the wings 
To those condemned to act accordingly 
And wait for succeeding kings 
And I try to harmonize with songs 
The lonesome sparrow sings 
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden 
... 
The kingdoms of Experience 
In the precious wind they rot 
While paupers change possessions 
Each one wishing for what the other has got 
And the princess and the prince 
Discuss what's real and what is not 
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden 

-- Bob Dylan, Gates of Eden. 



Science, like Nature
Must also be tamed
With a view towards it's Preservation

Given the same 
State of integrity
It will surely serve us well...

Neil Peart, Natural Science.

Re: RE: Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-12 Thread Carl Remick

From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Carl:
I think enlightenment comes from within, not from any evidence the
social sciences can produce.  But that's just me channeling R. W.
Emerson again.

if enlightenment comes only from within, then there's no way to convince
anyone else of the validity of your enlightenment. It's like those 
religious
people who say you have to Believe to understand. Well, I don't believe,
so I'll just put your religion on the shelf next to astrology.

The crowning irony is that belief in science *is* a religion, in effect if 
not design.  Lay people usually aren't competent to decide whether 
scientists have provided adequate proof for their arguments, and they're 
almost invariably unable to make reasoned assessments of disputes between 
scientists.  For most people, scientific pronouncements aren't at all 
illuminating but are as arbitary, opaque and mystifying as priestly decrees 
of ancient times.  Historian Carl Becker made this argument many years ago, 
as I recall, in his essay The Heavenly City of 18th Century Philosophers 
-- i.e., that the Enlightenment has not proved very enlightening.  Sure, 
people enjoy all the material benefits that modern technology produces, but 
they don't have a clue how this technology actually works; it might as well 
be magic.  This remains very much the age of belief, not the age of reason.

Carl

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Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-12 Thread Sabri Oncu

Dear All,

I had to spend some time on studying for an exam, that is, my
microeconomics exam, where the main topic was western
rationality, so I could not follow this discussion that closely.

But, apparently, I caused much turmoil on the list.

Let me clarify a few concepts, as I see them:

To me, reason is that power of the mind to understand the world,
and as such, it is universal to us all. And logic is that method
of reasoning that is employed by all in our planet, more or less,
also universally.

On the other hand, (western) rationality is that human behaviour,
possibly emerged in Europe some centuries ago, which attemps to
impose a complete order on an infinite dimensional set, that is,
a continuum, that I call life. Life as a continuum can at best be
a partially ordered, if that, at least, to my experience. Hence,
western rationality, as a form of human behaviour, is
unreasonable and, therefore, illogical. It is like trying to
order Paul Desmond's Take Five and Dede Efendi's Rast Kar-i
Natik in some way. Although they are both musical monuments, at
least, to my liking, they don't belong to the same equivalence
set, and hence, there is no way to compare one against the other.

What I have been observing in this virtual world since my virtual
being came to existence on that so-called J18 list has been that
unreasonable and illogical human behaviour. And observing that
this closely for that long really hurts.

Hence, my objection.

Best,

Sabri

Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-11 Thread Charles Jannuzi


--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
 At 05:12 PM 10/10/2002 +, you wrote:
 Again, I believe it's the nature of science
 itself -- not just the 
 corruptive effects of capitalism -- that so
 often causes technology to 
 have a destructive, dehumanizing impact on
 society.  The ever increasing 
 specialization of scientific knowledge seems
 to *require* division of 
 labor, bureaucratization of RD and
 minimization of individual 
 responsibility for long-term consequences --
 an extremely toxic combination.
 
 Right, all I'm saying is that this definition
 of science as a discipline 
 that slices things into increasingly thin
 slices, that ignores connections, 
 that ignores context, that cannot conceive how
 the observer can be included 
 in the observation is mostly an effect of
 cultural and economic 
 practices, not a cause. I am also saying that
 science does not have to be 
 limited to the above definition.
 
 Joanna


Scientific 'progress' has been mostly a series of
lurches this way and that (sometimes 'forward',
at least in the sense that we can not turn back
time and sometimes it's an improvement to forget
how we used to do things). 

When a major discovery is accidentally or
creatively made (yet the creativity involved is
largely ignored), we all pile on hoping to stake
a claim to a bit of the glory. Anything we wish
to call a science is a science (though we often
spend more time calling another's hobbyhorse
'pseudoscience'). To convince others of the
status claimed, it certainly helps if you can
take over a university department or press in
order to do so.

One could argue back that this is absurd, but
look at how just about every field of knowledge
and inquiry conducted at universities claims
scientific status now.

However, I see no essential connection between
'advances' in knowledge, in the sense of an
increased ability to understand our world or
improve our lives, and status as a science. Like
at a certain university I know where most
experiments are sophomoric training exercises or
just a huge waste of money on shit results (which
get written up as shit reports in order to
justify lots of the real shit--the green shit--to
go to the school from the government). Run
enough, though, and after we've put out the
explosion in the lab next door, we've found a
compound stronger than nitroglycerin. Progress!

C. Jannuzi





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Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-11 Thread Carl Remick

From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Carl writes:
 Again, I believe it's the nature of science itself -- not just the
 corruptive effects of capitalism -- that so often causes technology to
have
 a destructive, dehumanizing impact on society.  The ever increasing
 specialization of scientific knowledge seems to *require*
 division of labor, bureaucratization of RD and minimization of 
individual

 responsibility for long-term consequences -- an extremely toxic
combination.

I don't understand why scientific (consistent logical  empirical) thinking
_requires_ division of labor, bureaucratization, and the rest. Please
explain.

The sheer complexity of modern technologies requires that RD be a team 
effort; no one individual acting alone can supply the expertise needed to 
advance the state of the art.  If you have a team effort, you need 
administrators to coordinate efforts, allocate resources, etc.

Further, is there any way to convince anyone of the validity of your vision
except in a (social) scientific way?


Ah!  I think enlightenment comes from within, not from any evidence the 
social sciences can produce.  But that's just me channeling R. W. Emerson 
again.

Carl

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Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-10 Thread Yoshie Furuhashi


At 2:41 PM + 10/9/02, Carl Remick wrote:
How does scientific study do this by its nature?

Because scientific study requires that you rule out all variables 
not having to do explicitly with the subject being investigated.

You can't study everything at the same time, so you would have to 
determine what matters and what doesn't.  What doesn't matter -- like 
Providence included by creationists, skull sizes  shapes favored by 
phrenologists, etc. -- should be excluded; otherwise, there can be no 
scientific endeavor.  The question is where you draw the line, and 
that's where important political and scientific battles begin.
-- 
Yoshie

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Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-10 Thread Carl Remick


From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Joanna writes:
 A critique of the development of science under capitalism would take much
more than an email. Suffice it to say that what we refer to as SCIENCE
today is a specific historical form suffering from specific historical
deformations. I leave it to your imagination to envision how intelligent,
conscious beings might be able to develop alternative forms.

there's a difference between science in theory (what intelligent, 
conscious
beings might be able to develop) and science in practice (the degenerated
science of a pharmaceutical company, etc.)

Again, I believe it's the nature of science itself -- not just the 
corruptive effects of capitalism -- that so often causes technology to have 
a destructive, dehumanizing impact on society.  The ever increasing 
specialization of scientific knowledge seems to *require* division of labor, 
bureaucratization of RD and minimization of individual responsibility for 
long-term consequences -- an extremely toxic combination.

(Apologies for the delay in responding -- lately my pen-l posts seem to be 
taking the scenic route through the web.)

Carl

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Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-10 Thread joanna bujes


At 05:12 PM 10/10/2002 +, you wrote:
Again, I believe it's the nature of science itself -- not just the 
corruptive effects of capitalism -- that so often causes technology to 
have a destructive, dehumanizing impact on society.  The ever increasing 
specialization of scientific knowledge seems to *require* division of 
labor, bureaucratization of RD and minimization of individual 
responsibility for long-term consequences -- an extremely toxic combination.

Right, all I'm saying is that this definition of science as a discipline 
that slices things into increasingly thin slices, that ignores connections, 
that ignores context, that cannot conceive how the observer can be included 
in the observation is mostly an effect of cultural and economic 
practices, not a cause. I am also saying that science does not have to be 
limited to the above definition.

Joanna

RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-10 Thread Devine, James

Title: RE: Western Rationality

Joanna wrote:
A critique of the development of science under capitalism would take much
more than an email. Suffice it to say that what we refer to as SCIENCE
today is a specific historical form suffering from specific historical
deformations. I leave it to your imagination to envision how
intelligent, conscious beings might be able to develop alternative forms.

I wrote:
there's a difference between science in theory (what intelligent, conscious
beings might be able to develop) and science in practice (the degenerated
science of a pharmaceutical company, etc.)

Carl writes:
Again, I believe it's the nature of science itself -- not just the
corruptive effects of capitalism -- that so often causes technology to have
a destructive, dehumanizing impact on society. The ever increasing
specialization of scientific knowledge seems to *require*
division of labor, bureaucratization of RD and minimization of individual
responsibility for long-term consequences -- an extremely toxic combination.

I don't understand why scientific (consistent logical empirical) thinking _requires_ division of labor, bureaucratization, and the rest. Please explain.

Further, is there any way to convince anyone of the validity of your vision except in a (social) scientific way? or is it a simple expression of faith? (and what _is_ the alternative to scientific thinking? scientific thinking is _not_ the same as positivism.)

As Joanna says: ... science does not have to be limited to the above definition.

Right. We should look to scientists such as Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Stephen Rose, etc., not to the over-specialized scientists who populate the corporate machine.

BTW, the following seems to represent a result of scientific research. It's also the type of thing that can be tested, perhaps even falsified, using scientific method:

An Australian study of suicide over the last century has found
significantly increased rates when conservative governments
have been in power compared to Labor. They've taken into
account every factor they could think of which could have
explained the result and the relationship persists.

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http:/bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. -- Richard Feynman.

Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Carl Remick


From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  Ian:
  Indeed, lots of the problems of modernity are the uses
  to which logic, scientific thinking etc. have been put and those
  problems are not reducible to the problems created by capitalism.

Carl:
  Yes, I think the basis of many of modern society's worst  difficulties 
is
the
  pernicious objectification of the individual that results from the
  scientific method, in all its many forms -- especially
  including the social
  sciences -- and with all its many appurtenances, including
  collection and
  analysis of statistics such as the jobless rate.

so we shouldn't care about the number of unemployed individuals, even when
this number is measured accurately, because it peniciously objectifies the
individual? so if I refer to the high unemployment rate of 1933 in the
United States, I am objectifying people (and doing so perniciously)?

I think statistics are pernicious because the joys of playing with numbers 
dull awareness of the great sorrow that *any* quantity of joblessness 
creates -- one unemployed is a tragedy, a million, statistics, so to speak.  
When you start pondering numbers in the abstract, the next thing you know 
you're blathering about unavoidable tradeoffs, NAIRU and what level of 
unemployment is acceptable.  The acceptable level of unemployed is, of 
course, zero, and any economic system that can't accommodate that has to go. 
  Statistics get in the way of recognizing that truth.

  I don't know any answer to this problem, since science is so central to
modern life, but
  I do see it as a problem.  Scientific study by its nature puts distance
  between a human observer and human subject, creates a hierarchical
relationship and
  deliberately limits development of empathy.  I think this has had a 
deeply

  damaging effect on human relations overall.

How does scientific study do this by its nature?

Because scientific study requires that you rule out all variables not having 
to do explicitly with the subject being investigated.  If you're conducting 
a focus group, taking a poll or whatever, you have no interest in bonding 
with the interviewees/participants as full-dimensional people, you simply 
want to pump them for info on one narrow topic.  You ignore their 
existential reality in order to strip-mine their consciousness for data.  
Ugly stuff.

and what is the alternative to scientific thinking?

That's the horror of it all.  As Huxley suggested in Brave New World, there 
doesn't seem to be any choice between the dehumanization of science and 
reversion to simple savagery.  As I said, I don't have any answer to this.

Carl

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Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Charles Jannuzi


and what is the alternative to scientific 
thinking?

That's the horror of it all.  As Huxley suggested

in Brave New World, there 
doesn't seem to be any choice between the 
dehumanization of science and 
reversion to simple savagery.  As I said, I don't

have any answer to this.

Carl

I start by proclaiming that science does not
equal rationalism. In fact, they can be quite
exclusive of each other. Spend one day at a
university dominated by a college of science, and
you'll have to agree with me.

CJ

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Re: Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Louis Proyect



I start by proclaiming that science does not
equal rationalism. In fact, they can be quite
exclusive of each other. Spend one day at a
university dominated by a college of science, and
you'll have to agree with me.

CJ

Unfortunately critical thinking toward bourgeois science (and there *is* 
such a thing has been associated with postmodernist relativism, whereas in 
fact you can find an analogous critique in Lewontin and Levins's The 
Dialectical Biologist and elsewhere. Here is a pip of an article by 
Richard Lewontin that appeared in the Social Text alongside Sokal's 
specious spoof. I asked Sokal if he had read Lewins  Lewontin--he had not. 
Nor had he read Gramsci.

===

A la recherche du temps perdu: A Review Essay

Richard C. Lewontin

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and 
Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 
1994. 328 pages $25.95.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on 
Culture and Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 192 pages $23.00.

THE political movements in Europe and America in the 1960s hat Americans 
identify primarily with opposition to the Vietnam War were not, at base, 
pacifist or anticapitalist or counter-cultural or simply a revolt of 
youth against age--although they were all those things. Rather, they were 
held together by a general challenge to conventional structures of 
authority. They were an attempt to create a general crisis of legitimacy. 
They were a Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority and were made in the 
image of 1792 and the revolt of the Paris Commune. The state, the military, 
the corporate holders of economic power, those over thirty, males, 
white--all were the sources of authority and legitimacy that maintained a 
social structure riddled with injustice. Those who were in the forefront of 
the struggles of the sixties knew what their revolutionary forebears knew, 
that a real crisis of legitimacy is the precondition of revolutionary 
change. But their attempt failed, and the main sources of authority and 
legitimacy for civil and political life remain what they have been for two 
hundred years, apparently unaltered in their stability or sense of permanence.

There is, however, one bit of the body politic whose sores from the 
abrasions of the sixties have never quite healed over, rather like a bloody 
heel that is perpetually rubbed raw by a new shoe that doesn't fit the old 
foot. It is the academy and its intellectual hangers-on who, while not 
themselves professors, depend on academics to buy, assign, review, and cite 
their works. No one was more troubled, hurt, and indignant than the 
professional intellectuals when their legitimacy was challenged. The state 
and the corporations, after all, have long been the objects of attack. They 
are used to the fight, they know their enemies and they have the weapons to 
hand. Their authority can always be reinforced when necessary by the 
police, the courts, and the layoff. Intellectuals, on the other hand, are 
particularly vulnerable, because professional intellectual life is the 
nexus of all strands of legitimacy, yet it has had no serious experience of 
opposition. Despite the centrality of authority in intellectual life, the 
academy has not, since the seventeenth century, been immersed in a constant 
struggle for the maintenance of the legitimacy of its methods and products; 
on the contrary, it seemed for a long time to be rooted in universal and 
unchallenged sources of authority. Then, suddenly, students began to 
question the authority of the older and the learned. No longer were genteel 
and civilized scholars allowed to propagate their political and social 
prejudices without rude challenges from pimply adolescents. The attack on 
the legitimacy and authority of the academy during the sixties was met by 
incredulity, outrage, and anger. It produced an unhealing wound that 
continues to be a source of pain to some intellectuals, who see nothing but 
an irrational nihilism in the rejection of traditional structures of 
academic authority.

Were it only the institutional authority of professors that was challenged, 
the hurt would be nearly forgotten. For the most part the control of the 
scholarly environment has returned to its former masters-- although not 
without alteration: professors are no longer free to make racist and sexist 
remarks in class without challenge, and even quite innocent events may lead 
to serious struggles, making many academics long for the days when they 
could say anything they damn well pleased. But even more sinister 
developments have continued the crisis in the academy, long after the rest 
of civil and political society has restabilized. For the last three decades 
there has been a growing attack on the very intellectual foundations on 
which academic legitimacy is ultimately grounded. What was revealed even by 
the rather unsophisticated attacks of thirty

RE: Western Rationality

Title: RE: Western Rationality

Carl had written:
Yes, I think the basis of many of modern society's worst
difficulties is the
pernicious objectification of the individual that results from the
scientific method, in all its many forms -- especially
including the social
sciences -- and with all its many appurtenances, including
collection and
analysis of statistics such as the jobless rate.

I wrote:
so we shouldn't care about the number of unemployed
individuals, even when
this number is measured accurately, because it peniciously
objectifies the
individual? so if I refer to the high unemployment rate of
1933 in the
United States, I am objectifying people (and doing so perniciously)?

Carl:
I think statistics are pernicious because the joys of playing
with numbers
dull awareness of the great sorrow that *any* quantity of joblessness
creates -- one unemployed is a tragedy, a million,
statistics, so to speak.
When you start pondering numbers in the abstract, the next
thing you know
you're blathering about unavoidable tradeoffs, NAIRU and what
level of
unemployment is acceptable.

This is the old fallacious slippery slope argument, based on zero logic. It confuses the use of statistics (which can be done in a judicious or a injudicious way) with the hegemony of neoclassical economics. It's the latter which leads to blathering about unavoidable tradeoffs, NAIRU and what level of unemployment is acceptable.

I happen to think that there's a rational core to the NAIRU theory -- without thinking that there's an acceptable level or rate of unemployment. The fact is that capitalism _needs_ a certain amount of unemployment (or some substitute, like forced labor) to protect profitability. If it doesn't get that unemployment, the capitalists -- who have the power, BTW -- punish us with higher inflation and/or unemployment.

The high numbers of unemployment during the 1930s convinced a bunch of (liberal) economists that they should oppose their return -- even though the experience of that period was becoming forgotten. (Later folks reinterpreted the high numbers to make them sound okay, but they were widely recognized as fools.)

The acceptable level of unemployed is, of course, zero, and any
economic system that can't accommodate that has to go.
Statistics get in the way of recognizing that truth.

How can the acceptable level of unemployment be zero if it's impermissable to measure it?

The issue of attaining zero unemployment is not about measuring it. Rather, it's about figuring out a better way to organize society that doesn't organically involve unemployment (open or hidden).

Carl:
I don't know any answer to this problem, since science is
so central to modern life, but
I do see it as a problem. Scientific study by its nature puts distance
between a human observer and human subject, creates a hierarchical
relationship and
deliberately limits development of empathy. I think this has had a
deeply damaging effect on human relations overall.

I wrote:
How does scientific study do this by its nature?

Carl:
Because scientific study requires that you rule out all
variables not having to do explicitly with the subject being investigated. If
you're conducting a focus group, taking a poll or whatever, you have no
interest in bonding with the interviewees/participants as full-dimensional
people, you simply want to pump them for info on one narrow topic. You ignore their
existential reality in order to strip-mine their consciousness for data.
Ugly stuff.

one can rule out all sorts of variables for a single experiment or focus group without doing so for the entire range of one's research.

I wrote:
and what is the alternative to scientific thinking?

Carl:
That's the horror of it all. As Huxley suggested in Brave New World, there
doesn't seem to be any choice between the dehumanization of science and
reversion to simple savagery. As I said, I don't have any answer to this.

This sounds very Weberian: scientific rationality leads to the creation of an iron cage that imprisons humanity. Ignoring the conservatism of both Huxley and Weber, it's based on a deep pessimism, i.e., that workers and other oppressed groups can't use scientific (i.e., clear) thinking for their own purposes against the Machine. It's also based on a willful abstraction from the structures of societal dominance (capitalism, etc.) that misuse science to control rather than to liberate.

blathering away,

Re: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Carl Remick


From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]

The issue of attaining zero unemployment is not about measuring it. Rather,
it's about figuring out a better way to organize society that doesn't
organically involve unemployment (open or hidden).

Hear, hear, Jim.  Yes, let's keep our eyes on the prize!  There was merit in 
the other points you made in your post also.  My sour view of quantification 
certainly owes something to the fact that I scored far, far lower on my math 
than my verbal SAT and have been socially marginalized ever since :)

Carl

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RE: Western Rationality

Title: RE:  Western Rationality





 My sour view of quantification 
 certainly owes something to the fact that I scored far, far lower on my math 
 than my verbal SAT and have been socially marginalized ever since :)


I know you're kidding, but the SAT is a great example of the single number fallacy: there seem to be about eight separate kinds of intelligence, while the SAT and similar tests only measure two. This single number fallacy fits with the general Taylorist view that there's one best way to do anything, which only makes (a little) sense from management's perspective. Even more generally, the single number fallacy fits with the general capitalist philosophy that the value of everything should be measured by its contribution to profits.

(Strictly speaking, there's more than one best way to manage workers to promote profits, but that's another issue.) 
JD

Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Carrol Cox




Ian Murray wrote:
 
 
 Who the hell are you to unilaterally -- no, monopolistically -- decide what
 is and is not a legitimate question on this list? Is this list not a
 manifestation of a collective practice or are we, in your readings of post
 on this list, all solipsistic-monadic deceptive avatars engaged in a
 multilogue of the willfully misinterpretive?
 

I'm not so doing -- I don't have the power. Hence my posts were but one
voice in a larger conversation, were they not?

The denial of the question is _always_ an alternative (among many) to
anyone's question.

Is God Triune?

Those of us who are not Christians can only say, the question has no
purchase, it presumes an illicit set of presuppositions.

There are probably many alternative responses to my question, too. In
general I deny that free-floating questions, that is questions separated
from actual contexts, are legitimate: rather, they are disguised
statements, more or elss designed to forbid response to the actual
statement being made. The best way (perhaps the only way) on a maillist
to ask a question is to _answer_ it, letting the question be implicit in
the answer.

Incidentally, in my experience, this is a good pedagogical principle as
well; my awareness of it stems from childhood, in one of the two
interesting statements I ever found in the _Readers Digest_ -- one of
their little fillers. A child asks her mother where she came from. The
mother gives a half-hour answer on human sexuality and reproduction. The
child then responds: that's interesting. But Billy comes from St. Louis,
Sally comes from Milwaukee. Where do _I_ come from? My practice as a
teacher was to insist that students give _some_ sort of answer, no
matter how absurd, to any question they raised before I would answer it.
The practice worked, and I usually avoided what I suspect is one of the
major sources of student passivity.

The third-grade student asks a question. The teacher replies at length.
She asks, does that answer your question. The student, despairing of
having the actual question answered, responds with a Yes, and vows never
to submit herself to that kind of futility again.

Questions by themselves are almost always impossibly ambiguous -- _even_
when they are in good faith. I know your questions are always in good
faith. I won't say as much for most questions raised on LBO.

Carrol

RE: RE: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Eric Nilsson

Title: RE: "Western Rationality"



Jim 
wrote,

 ...eight separate kinds of 
intelligence,

Jim modestly fails to note his own contribution to this 
issue: there are also multiple kinds of 
stupidities.


Eric
/

RE: RE: RE: Western Rationality

Title: RE: "Western Rationality"



yeah, 
I've been stupid in many ways. 
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine 

  -Original Message-From: Eric Nilsson 
  [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 9:17 
  AMTo: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: [PEN-L:31167] 
  RE: RE: "Western Rationality"
  Jim 
  wrote,
  
   ...eight separate kinds of 
  intelligence,
  
  Jim modestly fails to note his own contribution to 
  this issue: there are also multiple kinds of 
  stupidities.
  
  
  Eric
  /

Re: Re: Re: Western Rationality


At 10:56 AM 10/09/2002 -0400, you wrote:
Unfortunately critical thinking toward bourgeois science (and there *is* 
such a thing has been associated with postmodernist relativism,

Not really. There is the work of Feyerabend and a tremendous amount of 
ground breaking by the phenomenlogists and by Wittgenstein. (that's just 
off the top of my head...there's lots more perfectly good non-pomo stuff).

Joanna

Re: RE: Western Rationality


Even more generally, the
single number fallacy fits with the general capitalist philosophy that
the value of everything should be measured by its contribution to
profits.
Yup.

Joanna

Re: Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality


At 02:41 PM 10/09/2002 +, you wrote:
That's the horror of it all.  As Huxley suggested in Brave New World, 
there doesn't seem to be any choice between the dehumanization of science 
and reversion to simple savagery.  As I said, I don't have any answer to this.

Oh, that's just silly. We have a historically constructed scientific 
model -- which is  deformed by the bureaucratization of science and by its 
largely unconscious and unreflective formation -- all of which is to say 
that our choice encompasses far more than this dehumanized science and 
savagery.

Joanna

Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality

2002-10-09 Thread Carl Remick


From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]

At 02:41 PM 10/09/2002 +, you wrote:
That's the horror of it all.  As Huxley suggested in Brave New World, 
there doesn't seem to be any choice between the dehumanization of science 
and reversion to simple savagery.  As I said, I don't have any answer to 
this.

Oh, that's just silly. We have a historically constructed scientific 
model -- which is  deformed by the bureaucratization of science and by its 
largely unconscious and unreflective formation -- all of which is to say 
that our choice encompasses far more than this dehumanized science and 
savagery.

Joanna

I'm all ears.  The dilemma Huxley poses has always struck me as the most 
nightmarish, and compelling, depiction of the human prospect.  I'd welcome 
details on how you see we can get out of this fix.

Carl




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Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality


At 06:01 PM 10/09/2002 +, you wrote:
From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]

At 02:41 PM 10/09/2002 +, you wrote:
That's the horror of it all.  As Huxley suggested in Brave New World, 
there doesn't seem to be any choice between the dehumanization of 
science and reversion to simple savagery.  As I said, I don't have any 
answer to this.

Oh, that's just silly. We have a historically constructed scientific 
model -- which is  deformed by the bureaucratization of science and by 
its largely unconscious and unreflective formation -- all of which is to 
say that our choice encompasses far more than this dehumanized science 
and savagery.

Joanna

I'm all ears.  The dilemma Huxley poses has always struck me as the most 
nightmarish, and compelling, depiction of the human prospect.  I'd welcome 
details on how you see we can get out of this fix.

Carl

Well, for one thing, I don't accept Huxley's binary. After all, the 
concentration camps were run very scientifically, but the savagery quotient 
was high. The same may be said of any sweatshop. It is also the case that 
the quality of life in many a savage nation is better than ours today.

A critique of the development of science under capitalism would take much 
more than an email. Suffice it to say that what we refer to as SCIENCE 
today is a specific historical form suffering from specific historical 
deformations. I leave it to your imagination to envision how intelligent, 
conscious beings might be able to develop alternative forms.

Joanna

RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Western Rationality