Human Side Podcast 13: The Shaman

Is there an "antidote" to alienation in the West? Part III of a series of podcasts on Jordan Peterson and philosophy as therapy.

Human Side Podcast 12: Critique of Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson now leads a vast internet army. What are the implications for his thinking? A discussion with reference to the English philosopher John Gray, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the great theorist of crowds, Elias Canetti.

Human Side Podcast 11: Jordan Peterson / Order & Chaos

Discussion of the work of Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, James C Scott, Wittgenstein and others.

Human Side Podcast 08: Madmen at the Wall

Discussion of the nature of truth for localized hunter-gatherers vs. truth for sedentary, agricultural peoples. Also mountain lions, big rig trucking, the divinities past and present, and the emergence of the "individual" in Western thought. With reference to James C Scott, Hugh Brody, Edmund Carpenter, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, etc.

5 Aspects of the Great Philosopher

First, a philosopher must have his physical health. He must be strong. Wittgenstein was strong and his philosophy displays that strength. Nietzsche was weak and infirm and his body betrays portions of what he writes (he writes of what he would like to have been).

 

Second, a philosopher must have experience. He must have left his own country and lived in foreign lands. He must have had to struggle with daily concerns in new languages. He must have had to struggle with the simplest aspects of life, things he never considered while in his home country. He must have had varied jobs, both skilled and unskilled, and worked alongside many types of men.

 

Third, a philosopher should know extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Wittgenstein knew both and this knowledge is understated in any examination of his writing. It is also better to do philosophy when poor than when rich. But to do philosophy while poor and hoping to become rich will doom a man‘s thinking.

 

Fourth, a philosopher must have taken physical risks. He must have felt pain and been fearful. He must have had concerns about whether he would live or die. He must have been insecure. It is best to perform these physical risks when he is young and vital and naive. Wittgenstein received formative training in this area in the trenches of WWI. It resulted in the great insight in the Tractatus of “the mystical.”

 

Fifth, a philosopher must not be at a university. He must not receive acclaim from academic men or have a following. It is essential he not receive fame or money from doing his work. Ideally, a philosopher would do all his important work and then, just before his death, when he was no longer thinking clearly or doing philosophy, he would catch a momentary glimpse of fame. Because fame, the applause of lesser men, is also an experience worth knowing, though it has in all cases been destructive to active philosophers.

For Readers of Ludwig Wittgenstein

So much of Wittgenstein’s writing is asking the reader to imagine practical situations. He asks you to imagine some construction workers doing this and calling for this or that. Or in a store there is a drawer that contains this or that and one gives this or that when a particular word is spoken. It goes on and on this way.

But would it not have been more instructive for the readers and philosophers if Wittgenstein had instead asked them to go work at a construction site? Or to go to a foreign country where they did not know the language and to try to live there? He might have said after an aphorism: “Now, travel to a foreign land you know little of. Take no money with you. Live there until you have learned this or that. Then pick up with the next aphorism.”

Wouldn’t the whole discussion of “the mystical” been better advanced had Ludwig written: “Stop reading here. Now go to a war. Demand to be put on the front lines in the fiercest fighting. Continue to the next aphorism if you have survived.”

Much of Wittgenstein’s writing is basically asking academic, upper class men to imagine what it would be like to work on construction sites, operate a corner store, speak a foreign language badly, or be at the front lines of a war. Clearly, Wittgenstein was sour on philosophy because he felt he was having to explain life, how most people live it and have lived it in human history--indeed, how he had lived and thereby learned to do philosophy--to a bunch of overly-domesticated, physically unfit, university-sequestered half-men. 

Miracles

“But was the spirit of the soil his friend? The plant that is cut down one year, yet grows again the next — did this miracle make him religious and silent? The stones, and the heather, and the branches of trees, and the grass, and the woods, and the wind, and the great heaven of all the universe — were these his friends?”—Hamsun, Look Back on Happiness

“But what then does it mean to be aware of the world as a miracle at some times and not at others?” —Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics

50. Man lives in denial of so many miracles. That the plant that sustains him grows again after he has harvested from it. That the world exists. Instead he turns these miracles into facts, items for textbooks and academic journals; facts to be assembled into theories. The facts of science deny the world its miracle and thereby remove man’s responsibility to it. The plant becomes a resource and not a mysterious gift. The plant becomes a source of income, a way to place himself higher in the economic typology of men.

51. That man should feel religiously about the world is the most important fact of all. It is the fact that destroys all other facts. It is the fact for which there is no science. But for science to exist it is the first fact that must ignored.

59. The gods required man to remark upon the miraculous, to be in awe of it. Without man there is no one to admire the miracle, to give thanks, and to make great art to celebrate it. Without man the gods are lonely. That men are bound to the world is a miracle, and it is only through the gods that they are so bound.

65. Science removes man from the world. Science destroys its miracle. And science is never silent: it is always boasting of what it has explained and will explain. Through science man divests himself of responsibility for the world, for man’s responsibility for the world is itself miraculous.

Science and Myth

“Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” —Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.42

“Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge.”—Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

33. Western man lacks the attitude for the ethical or aesthetic: He looks to science for the meaning of the world. Economics instructs him on how to act in it. His technology he accepts as the limits of his world.

42. Myth leaves the world as it is, but changes man’s attitude towards it. Myth provides a clarity about the world that changes man’s feeling about it. His clarity exists as a feeling, an aesthetic experience of the world. It is a clarity that leaves the world unchanged. Science, in contrast, attempts to produce a clarity absent any feeling by breaking the world down and separating it and, in the service of technology, by transforming it.

45. To be without a feeling towards the world or other men is to be without any ethics, any aesthetic sense. The man of science calls this objectivity. The man of economics calls this rationality. To Western men these are privileged and valuable positions. (These are the attributes of the autistic.)

64. Western man wants to take orders. What is orderly can be made to function more efficiently. He conceives life in terms of his systems and their smooth running. The threat to the functioning of his systems is the meaning of life.

Mystery

“Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through ‘experience’. ― Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. ― This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here. ― What one acquires here in not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but they do not form a system and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating rules.” ― Wittgenstein

1. The problem with the objective stance (where Reason is thought to reside) is it supposes man might subtract himself from experience. It supposes he might uncover what is truthful by not being a part of it. Indeed, the idea of scientific objectivity goes against the idea of engagement in the world (even of there being a world ― there are only components and causal relationships). Truth, the objective man surmises, exists solely with man and his special vantage point upon the world: from beyond it. Man attempts to make himself world-less, without direct experience in the world, studying it from afar, and in doing so he claims to know it.

2. This leads him to undermine the question of how to live. One who can truly ask this question is one who begins by examining the idea of how he is worldly. Only when man can grasp his worldliness can he begin to ask in what manner he should act in the world.

9. By being reasonable man risks losing the world.

12. One begins to grasp at truth when one stops looking for the formula. Indeed, it is where systematic description begins to fail. It is as if he were trying to retell a dream ― the chasm between the dream images and feeling, and the words he uses to recount it is vast. He feels in recounting the dream the limitation of his language, its insufficiency.

16. His technological inventions show him the correctness of his scientific method. He believes that the same reasonableness he uses to control the world may be put to use in his own life. But this same method when applied to himself entirely misses the mark. Problems and method pass each other by.

22. Poets and religious men disappeared at the same time.

41. How unfortunate that his religious belief has been limited to appeals made during hardship. The man who loses his child to accident laments, “Everything happens for a reason.”

42. It is as if the man said, there is a reason for this and I summon God to provide it. Surely it did not happen accidentally, or by bad luck. This mystery shall be solved. The child was too important. There is the assumption that despite the horror of the child’s death it will finally in the future lead to something better. The child will be redeemed. The father will look back at the child’s death and say “That is why it happened.” The man’s appeal is to reason and not to God.

45. What is religious is only a placeholder until a reasonable explanation can be made.

49. The difference of this age from another is in the following statements: “Everything happens for a reason” and “Everything happens by the grace of God.” The former implies the reasonableness of God’s plan, that it can be made clear by men. The latter leaves it all to God: what is mysterious to men is accepted as mysterious.

57. The inability to explain cruelty and suffering brings into existence the gods. The gods dwell in this place of mystery. It is where reason cannot go.

63. The Muslims are a more religious ― and stronger ― people because of their comfort living within God’s mystery. They feel no need to explain their suffering.

88. What of the time when explanation began and ended with the gods? When a man who was physically blinded was understood to truly see?

Ludwig

1. The problem is present in language. The problem is nowhere else. Problems do not exist outside of language.

2. Why not then learn to speak a new language? One free of those problems?

3. A new language is a new form of life. A new language forces you to live in a new way.

4. Other languages are only found in other places. You must go to where an other form of life exists. Where of what they speak is without nonsense. In that world, where the things that are said to exist here are not, there are no words for them. You must go to where the things are not and not introduce the words that will bring those things. You must take care to keep the troubling words out.

5. Small groups. Non-western people. Jungles. Deserts. Nomadic hunter gatherers maybe. Probably do have some nonsense regardless--ideas of gods and other early language developments toward nonsense; other early language attempts at extending the order and rationalizing it.

6. The canning factory will just dull the mind of the problems, Ludwig. I'm not sure at all how a lobotomy of this sort is therapeutic, Ludwig.

7. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

8. Does telling someone to stop using a word really work? What has happened to that word? What has happened to that person?

9. Why didn't Ludwig go where they spoke less nonsense?

10. Solitude.

Implications

"The notion that cultural evolution entirely postdates biological or genetic evolution passes over the most important part of the evolutionary process, that in which reason itself was formed. The idea that reason, itself created in the course of evolution, should now be in a position to determine its own future evolution (not to mention any number of other things which it is also incapable of doing) is inherently contradictory, and can readily be refuted." --Hayek

1. Early language was tied to the instincts and biologies of the small group--it's needs. And much more aligned with the instincts of the individual.

2. Later, with the extension of the order (read: the emergence of the faceless State)--the enlarging of the group to include more people--language broke with instinct and biology to satisfy the needs of an extended order. People were made to act against their instincts in order to receive the promise of greater benefits within the larger group. These are early moralities.

3. The strong of the smaller group become the 'even stronger' of the extended order.

4. Language as will to power. The mythology of reason--that it enhances and guides life.

5. Language establishes the extended order by rationalizing it.

6. Man as the rationalizing animal, not the reasonable animal.

7. The language of morality is in fact nonsense. All language to establish the extended order is nonsense.

8. Language with meaning is that which arises from the instincts of the individual. (When Ludwig threatened with the firepoker things were suddenly very clear to the philosophers.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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