Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 00:09:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Paul Antschel <antschel-AT-m-net.arbornet.org>
Subject: RE: preterite freedom


Eric wrote:

> Anonymous,
>
> OK, now I'm really confused. Is Paul your friend, your roommate, your
> doppelganger or your alter ego?  In addition to being paranoid, are you
> now implying you are really just a paranoid schizophrenic out for a
> virtual walk, just begging for a Good Samaritan to perform
> schizoanalysis?

I would answer but how can I be certain that you're really Eric and not
someone else, merely pretending to be Eric in order to trick me.

:)

However the last thing I want is for some Good Samaritan to perform
schizoanalysis.

> I don't want to duck this issue of science and free will so easily,
> however. Certainly, you are aware science deals with functional concepts
> that are very specific and a leap must always be made in order for it to
> cross over into more philosophical issues like free will, cosmology and
> 'the meaning of it all'. It is a border-crossing of genres, another
> language game, and to assume science is capable of making such
> monolithic pronouncements in earnest is simply bad philosophy.

It's interesting that you should mention language games. In the late
philosophy of Wittgenstein, he used language games as a therapy aimed at
severing the connection (the logical connection) between meaning and mind.
In the Blue Book, for example, Wittgenstein asks what it means to make the
claim that we know a tune: does it mean that before we sing it we have
quickly whistled it to ourselves silently; or that we have a picture of
the score in our heads? Is claiming to know the tune dependent upon having
it stored up someplace inside us? Or is it simply singing the tune, or
perhaps many tunes and saying, "that one just there is the right tune".
The tune, and the question of just where it is stored when we claim to
know it, widens out in the "Philosophical Investigations" to memory images
and the bases for all claims to know.

Again and again Wittgenstein tries to sever the certainty of these claims
from a picture of a mental space in which definitions and rules are
stored, awaiting application. His work became an attempt to confound our
picture of the necessity that there can be a private mental space (a space
only available to the single self) in which meanings and intentions have
to exist *before* they could issue into the space of the world. The model
of meaning that Wittgenstein implores us to accept is a model severed from
the legitimizing claims of a private self.

> There is also not really much unanimous agreement, even at the level of
> neuroscience, about how to interpret this data. Furthermore, in an epoch
> of quantum physics and chaos theory, there is much less of a presumption
> that this data can be interpreted contextually in such a deterministic
> fashion in the way you seem to want.

I'm not saying I "want" to interpret the data you refer to in a
deterministic fashion. Those messages should be interpreted as
hypothetical. More like questions than assertions. My view, if I had to
give one would be that no one really knows and you can't find out.

> Even if the body is a megalopolis composed of a hundred trillion cells,
> this resolves neither the issues of will nor those of the subject. As
> far back as Plato and the early Christians, the soul has often been seen
> as composite. The ancients argued that the same laws that bring about
> justice within the city also lead to the proper governance of the
> well-ordered soul, in an analogous fashion. The body politic begins at
> home.

> In the classic terminology of modern philosophy, you also come up
> against the aporias Kant laid out in his own philosophical works. From
> the standpoint of pure reason, the world seems to operate in a
> deterministic fashion. From the standpoint of practical reason, however,
> we must assume an agent who becomes his or her own causality, pursuing
> rational ends that simply do not arise from nature alone.
>
> This issue has remained unresolved up until the present day.  Even a
> contemporary philosopher such as Donald Davidson, who unfortunately just
> recently passed away, developed a theory he called anomalous monism to
> deal with precisely this kind of paradox. He would have argued that your
> unmitigated monism is flawed, even from the standpoint of radical
> interpretation.
>
> You can make up all the deterministic theories you want, but in the end,
> you still need to make a choice in the morning when you wake up either
> to get up or go back to sleep. As Sartre once succinctly put, you are
> condemned to freedom. Not to recognize this as your implicit situation
> is simply to show "bad-faith".

Paul attempted to refute the argument I made for determinism and I,
(speaking for the moment in the third person as "anonymous") am unable to
come up with a counter-argument to anything he said. So perhaps we're
really in agreement on this issue.

And everything you say above may be true. Your arguments are certainly
well reasoned. However, as a borderline schizophrenic, I have difficulty
understanding many of your statements. And I'm not acting in
"bad-faith" when I say this. I simply don't experience "myself" as a
unity and have no clear understanding of what people mean when they speak
of themselves in the first person. I honestly tend to think of "myself" in
the third person, as he or it, almost never as "I". Or as multiple,
interchangeable selves. So when Sartre tells me I'm condemned to freedom,
it's unclear which me he's referring to. Perhaps he means that all of my
multiple identities are condemned to freedom? Which doesn't mean to imply
Sartre's statement is false, merely that I have trouble understanding it.

> The other issue I am trying to present is the ethical one.
>
> Once we get away from the whole ethical charade of normative behavior
> based upon abstractly defined 'rights of man', we still need to take
> responsibility at the margins for our impossible future. This transcends
> the whole issue of agency and free will, which deal with capability and
> not with obligation. As Lyotard has pointed out, the category of 'must'
> is very different from that of 'necessity'.

Recently I've been attempting to reread Lyotard's "Heidegger et les
juifs", one of the few books that survived the unusual circumstances
I lived through for seven years on the Swiss-French border.

However I simply don't understand Lyotard's statement that the category of
"must' is very different from the category of "necessity". Could you
possibly rephrase this or give a specific example of what he intended?

> It is interesting you quote Beckett because I see him as being very
> distant from the usual existential pessimistic cell in which critics
> tend to cage him up in like a wild beast. In certain respects, his art
> is very much involved with exactly these same ethical themes.  In fact,
> when I quoted Pynchon's line - "across the snow's footprints and tire
> tracks finally to the path you must create yourself, alone in the dark."
> - I certainly heard echoes of Beckett in that. Didn't you?

Yes, it's a beautiful line, and I did hear echoes of Beckett there.

> Even though (as I am doing now) the statement from Three Dialogues is
> often taken out of context, these great words of Beckett have always
> been a touchstone for me:
>
> "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to
> express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire
> to express, together with the obligation to express."
>
> Doesn't this very sense of obligation that Beckett describes make us the
> hostage to an impossible freedom?  In the end, I act because I must -
> even though science, the media, religion, and the state tell me I should
> do otherwise.

Perhaps. However, Beckett's writing would've been incomprehensible to
Sartre. Can you imagine Sartre reading "Fizzles" or Texts for Nothing"
and making any connection between these obscure texts of schizophrenic
voices and his own philosophy? Beckett and Sartre might as well have lived
on separate planets.

Having said that, I prefer your phrase "hostage to an impossible freedom"
to Sartre's "condemned to freedom". It's an interesting way to look at it,
and you may be onto something there.

Beckett, of course, unlike Sartre, had no interest in celebrity, least of
all his own. Upon winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, he not
only skipped the ceremony, but fled to Tunisia to avoid detection. He
complained the world was polluted with meaningless blather. He even
referred to his own writing as mere "a stain upon the silence."

One final note. I would disagree with any interpretation of Beckett's
writing as man dreaming of God. I'm thinking in particular of "Waiting for
Godot", which is often misinterpreted as just that.

When specifically asked about this Beckett often responded "If I knew who
Godot was, I would have said so in the play"

Beckett nonetheless acknowledged that the identity of the mysterious Godot
merited some explanation.

Roger Blin, the first director of the play, was also the first to ask the
playwright who - or what - Mr. Godot was, and where the name came from.
Beckett said it suggested itself to him through the French words godillot
and godasse which are slang for "boot." Feet and shoes figure prominently
in the play, reasoned Blin, so perhaps this explanation was enough. It was,
at any rate, Beckett's usual response to this query.

regards,

Paul