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Week #3, Continued: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, February 2nd.
Previous Notes for 1st two weeks begin here |
 The Table of Contents |
Let's begin
by taking a look at the TOC.
Part 1 has the triad of
1. The Contingency of Language
2. The Contingency of Selfhood
3. The Contingency of a Liberal Community
What we have here is a rethinking of
1. Logos
2. Ethos
3. Pathos
Moreover, what we have here is the return of the tryangle (... misspelled so as to signify the liberal tradition and its reliance on multiple angles of vision, its belief in "perspectives by incongruity," its "will to toleration," from the sophists to the present [See Eric Havelock, ch. 7, liberal temper, of The Literate Revolution...]).
If you recall I mentioned earlier that Aristotle's identification of the three major proofs (logos, pathos, ethos) corresponded with the encoder-decoder-reality-(code). So be aware that we are reNOticing that the authors we are reading are thinking by way of a common set of conceptual starting places, that there is a common conversation going on as the authors work through common issues. Language is a common issue! The self--whatever "it" is--is a common issue. And community! (As I said last seminar, recursiveness is built in automatically, reflexively.)
We will return to each of these chapters with questions, but for now Let's examine
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The Introduction/Statements of Purpose: |
RR begins to point to some of his concerns:
 the public and the private
human nature (the essence of it, or the learning of a cultural nature [physis/nomos])
...The issue here is self and other, self and community, solidarity? How it should be realized, if even attempted?
"What is it to be a human being?" or "What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth-century democratic society?", "How can an inhabitant of such a society be more than the enactor of a role in a previously written script?" (again, physis/nomos)
"Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates (e.g., Heidegger adn Foucault) still tend to see socialization as Nietzsche did--as antithetical to something deep within us."
"Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates (e.g., Dewey and Habermas) are still inclined to see the desire for private perfection as infected with 'irrationalism' and 'aestheticism.' "
RR's statement of purpose: "This book tries to do justice to both groups of historicist writers. I urge that we not try to choose between them but, rather, give them equal weight and then use them for different purposes."
Graphically represented:
Question: Are there problems with this split? (Keep in mind that there are problems with every dyad, triad, etc.; the issue is identifying the limitations of each. And so how would you go about "looking for" problems here?)
Note: We have again circled back around. This time RR's interests echo back to our querries about K. Hayle's triadic model of change. Here we have definite connections with the first two stages in her model (which I have reversed so as to be parallel with RR's distinction above), "autopoiesis" (private perfection) vs. "homeostasis" (human solidarity). But does RR ever get close to the conditions for the possibility of the Virtual?, which is Hayles's third.
"I use 'ironist' to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires--someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.
For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question 'Why not be cruel?'--no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. Nor is there an answer to the question "How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects of self-creation?... Anyone who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question--algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort--is still,
| An algorithmic view of a social problem invites the audience to see the problem as a well-made one and that has one, and only one, correct answer/solution.
A heuristic view invites the audience to see the problem as ill-defined or, better put, noisey and that has a number of reasonable answers/solutions.
An aleatory view invites the audience to see the problem as resolvable by chance (or is a product of chance [tuche] and time [kairos]) and that has an infinity of possible answers/solutions.
Anyone who is a rationalist can only see the later, the third possiblity, as based on superstition and as dangerous.
The differences here are drammatic and complicated. These three are important to our reading of RR, not only because he does not favor algorithms to be used on social problems but also because he does acknowledge the value of living life based on chance/contingency. (See p. 22.) |
in his heart, a theologican or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.
The ironist intellectuals who do not believe that there is such an order are far outnumbered ... by people who believe that there must be one. most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism. So ironism has often seemed intrinsically hostile not only to democracy but to human solidarity.... But it is not...."
RR's continuation of the statement of purpose: "One of my aims in this book is to suggest the possibility of a liberal utopia: one in which ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal.... In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearning away 'prejudice' or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, 'They do not feel it as we would,'..." (bold emphasis mine)
Question/Provocation: How would Hayles's third stateless, the Virtual, figure (trope) in here? How might it make possible what appears to be impossible? Remember that the Virtual is the nonhuman!
We will examine, this evening, the intriguing (and self-interrogating) questions that RR puts forth in his book. It is important to consider how this book and its various para/arguments and questions are or might be responded to in R/C. We will do just that. If you know of anyone in R/C who has commented on or used in a sufficient manner RR's Contingency, irony, and Solidarity, then bring in the work and let's take a look see.
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