Happy T explains where he writes his X on the Post-Modern map.

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Continuing the thread on language determinism, Flemming Funch writes:

I’ve noticed how Chinese or Japanese speakers often will make certain consistent mistakes in English. Like mixing up singular and plural. Some people figure it out eventually, but some people never do. For an English speaker it is obvious that noodles is plural, because there are many noodles on a plate. A Chinese person is just as likely to call it “noodle”, not because he can’t count, but because he’s seeing it differently. I suppose focusing on the substance, not on the individual pieces. A Korean person leading a Yoga class might say “Touch your left feet”. I only have one left foot, but in Korean thinking it makes sense that he’s talking to the group, and there obviously are a whole bunch of left feet there. The English speaker will be very focused on himself individually, whereas a Korean will think more as a group.

Cool examples!

Jonathan replies patiently to a post by Baldur Bjarnason that argues that culture forms language and not vice versa. Language is “a weapon” used in fights between cultures, Baldur says. It seems he’s saying that if you lose your language, you lose your culture, which implies the opposite of what he’s arguing. In any case, both sides in the argument over linguistic relativism can (and should) support preserving local languages, IMO.

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I’ve been a bad bad boy. It’s been a busy few weeks and I haven’t kept up with the blogiverse as closely as I’d like. So I’m late in coming to the quite wonderful thread on “language determinism” started by Stavros the Wonder Chicken with a brilliant post that uses Korean as an example to shake up our assumptions about whether we speak language or language speaks us.

Among many others who responded was Jonathon Delacour who cites Heidegger saying Language is the house of Being.” (The “language speaks us” trope is also Heidegger’s.) Jonathon writes:

Heidegger seems to be suggesting a far more active role in the construction of language (and therefore) culture for those who think (philosophers?) and those who create (writers and poets?). Hopefully, a fully-fledged philosopher will clarify Heidegger?s intention.

Clarify Heidegger’s intention? Hahahaha, that’s a good one! But, since my doctoral dissertation was on Heidegger, I’m going to take a swing at this one anyway. Since it’s been 20 years since I read the ol’ Nazi, this will be more what-I-think-I-learned-from-Heidegger about language than a scholarly exegesis of his thought.

At bottom, here’s why Heidegger mattered to me. I was a freshman in college. I was in the midst of what we used to call an “existential crisis.” It seemed obvious to me that the meaning we saw in the world was merely what we project onto it. And we’re not talking about Capital M Meanings like “Love thy neighbor” or “Go forth and multiply.” No, it was more along the lines of: we only see a difference between a tree’s roots and the ground that they’re in; the world doesn’t really divide up the way we think it does. (Ah, peyote! I miss it still!)

By learning about the history of philosopy, I learned that this line of thought, which seemed so obvious and incontrovertible, in fact had a history: I was thinking that way because 2,500 years of overly-intellectual white guys worked themselves into a corner. (A surprising percentage of the great white philosophers died virgins. ‘Nuff sed.)

By learning about phenomenology in general, I learned that the sundering of meaning and reality was in fact a special mood to which we moderns are susceptible, and that that mood does not have special revelatory power. That is, when Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea sees the tree’s roots as alien and meaningless, that is not a revelation of the truth of the tree but a projection of 2,500 years of twisted philosophical thought.

Third — and now we’re getting closer to Heidegger on language — I learned from Heidegger that things always present themselves to us as something: the apple tree shows itself as an apple tree, the hammer as a hammer. Further, things show themselves within a project: eating an apple, harvesting apples, getting an apple to throw at postal worker, etc. The idea of a thing-in-itself makes as much sense as what yellow looks like when the lights are off.

Fourth, I came to accept that the interesting and important phenomenon to explain is the ordinary experience of our world in which what is shows itself as something. The notion of Reality as that which stands apart from human experience comes about only in two highly suspect ways: In the mood of despair and in the overly-rational, abstract contemplations of philosophers.

Heidegger’s Big Point about language, at least as it affected me, is that it is not a medium of communication. It first and foremost the “as”-ness of our experience. When we speak together, we are not shipping meanings from one mind to another. We are instead turning towards the world together, letting the world reveal itself in its as-ness.

Further, language is a “gesture.” Heidegger doesn’t do a great job laying this out (perhaps because he offers the gesture idea as a gesture), but I find the idea deeply appealing for two reasons.

First, the existing theory of language said that good language is precise. Nah, says the gesture idea. Good language is ambiguous because it’s contextual. The “as-ness” of a thing is, Heidegger writes in Being and Time, totally contextual: a hammer can’t be a hammer (for driving nails) without a context that includes nails, lumber, trees, humans as builders, humans as needers of shelter, etc. Words are also contextual; language is not a one-to-one relationship of grunt to thing.

Second, the current theory said that language is about A getting an internal idea out of his head and into B’s head. The gesture idea says that language is about A revealing the world in a particular way to B. Language is a way we turn towards the world together, not a way we replicate inner states.

So: Language is the house of Being because language fundamentally is the as-ness of the world, and to be is to be as something.

Now, in response to the blogthread. Heidegger has a heroic view of the development of language. He believes that poets are the real philosophers because poets shape language and thus shape being (the way the world presents itself to us). He doesn’t want to say that poets make stuff up, so he instead has an idea of Being unfolding itself in history. Shades of Hegel, but perhaps motivated by his need to shore up Nazism as not just a great idea for a political party but as a destiny of the German people. You can’t have a destiny unless history is unfolding.

So, let’s leave aside the question of how the history of language develops. On a smaller scale, Heidegger certainly thinks that language isn’t merely how we experience the world, for he rejects the idea that we start out with two poles: the world and our perception. No, for him the world is what shows itself to us, and it shows itself to us in the as-ness of language. Language is the house of being. It’s also the floorplan of being, and the wallpaper and matching sofa of being.

Believe it or not, I am trying to be clear.

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Arnold Kling writes about the continuing triumph of technologists over humanists:

The Kling thesis is that the project of the humanists is degenerating into an exercise in archaeology. It is a way to study where we have been. But it does not tell us where we are going.

Arnold paraphrases Will Wilkinson to define the terms:

a humanist arrives at understanding subjectively, through introspection and empathy. A scientist arrives at understanding objectively, through the scientific method.

One of his examples:

To a humanist, the recent war in Iraq had the potential to turn into a quagmire. To a technologist, such an outcome was highly unlikely, given the advances that had taken place in computer and communication technology in just the last ten years.

The question of the accuracy of smart bombs is for the scientists. Humanists who pronounced on that topic via introspection and empathy were misapplying their skills. But technologists who pronounced on the wisdom and morality of the war based on their assessment of the accuracy of smart bombs were also off base.

Are humanism and science equals, then? Nah. Humanism is broader and more fundamental. But not if you define it as “introspection and empathy.” That’d be like defining science as “measuring stuff.” Humanists, as I understand the term, don’t sit around looking inwards. Originally, humanism was a break from God-centered philosophies, asserting the magnificence of our capabilities as opposed to our feebleness and frailness in the face of our Creator. The term has come to refer to those who assert something like: 1) There is no external authority that settles all questions for us; 2) Human reason is not all that matters; 3) Human experience does not reduce to the physical.

If that’s an acceptable definition, put me down as a humanist.

And I don’t want to leave it at a misty-eyed plea for embracing both points of view. I love technology and want every child trained in the scientific method. Objectivity is one very important way of seeing the world. It has precedence in certain projects, and those projects are crucial. But it is just one stance we can take toward the world. Humanism, however, isn’t just one stance. It is what explains — and grounds — how and why we humans take different stances towards the world, including science.

Humanism rulz! We’re #1! We’re #1! Whooooo!

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Steve Talbott picks an excellent argument with Bill McKibben who argues in his new book, “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age”, that once we’re able to alter our children’s DNA, our offspring will have no sense of a self that is their own. Talbott’s point is that McKibben gives too much credit to the power of DNA to determine who we are:

By appearing to validate the scientist’s (and the public’s) conviction that we are our protein-producing DNA, McKibben is assisting the engineers’ program. For while his commendable aim is to convince us to pull back from the eugenic brink, the fact is that those who think they are their DNA are exactly the ones who will clamor for a new and improved self, or at least for new and improved children.

Will the genetic engineers make our lives meaningless? This is ever so close to the truth, yet light years away from it. No one can, in absolute terms, rob someone else of meaning. What makes life meaningless is our rejection of meaning — a rejection we have already given expression to when we conceive ourselves as the product of DNA “mechanisms”.

Talbott then goes on to the larger point:

That the worshippers of machinery, efficiency, and power are engaged today in a fateful assault upon the human being is beyond all doubt. McKibben performs a valuable service by documenting this assault for a large audience from the mouths of the commandos carrying it out. There is no shortage of testimony.

And then the truth:

If it’s true, as I have suggested, that we unavoidably affect each other’s destinies — for ill, but also for good — then everything hinges upon our understanding of this mutuality. And the first thing to grasp is that healthy human exchange is, and is essentially, a matter of mutuality. We are called to engage each other in a mutually respectful dance or conversation, which is very different from unilateral manipulation. Conversation or manipulation: *this* is the decisive distinction.

Finally, the Parthian shot at the transhumanist extropians, et al.:

You can’t read the futuristic scenarios and personal hopes of the re-engineers of humanity without being struck by the utter childishness of it all. Genetic modifications that will save us from the necessity of bodily excretion; nano-contrived plants that look exactly like orchids but can grow in frigid climes; robots that wait on us like slaves; a cyber-nano- genetically engineered “elite race of people who are smart, agile, and disease-resistant”; nanobot swarms able to wander the human bloodstream and keep us eternally healthy; technological horns of plenty that will convert every “desolate” village into “a Garden of Eden, with widescreen TVs and cappuccino machines for all”….and so on ad infinitum.

And many of these visions come from the same people who delight in ridiculing the “childish hopes” of the traditionally religious!

I’m a-liking Talbott…

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As you probably already know, there’s a fascinating thread about authenticity and truth in the selves we’re constructing via weblogs. This piece, late in the thread, by Burning Bird is a good place to start. And this piece by Jonathon Delacour is seminal.

I love this topic but I don’t see what’s specific to weblogging about it. Don’t the same questions apply whenever we talk? I have never told an anecdote or story that wasn’t fictitious in some sense. Except on the Web, our self is purely public and written, so we can’t fall back on the myth of the Inner Private Real person that allows us to act as if there’s the possibility of our “outer expressions” corresponding to our Inner Real Self. I.e., the false possibility of authenticity is closed off to us in the virtual world. (I’m burning to say more but I have to go out to a meeting. Ack!)

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Akma‘s being all smart again. He’s drawing a connection between digital ID and the self we identify as who we are.

That’s a connection I’ve been reluctant to make, but AKMA asks about it in a compelling way. AKMA reflects on the aspects of us that we count as standing for ourselves: Face, yes. Fingerprints, a little. DNA, no way. AKMA isn’t denying that DNA is a unique, reliable identifier (how else are we going to be able to tell all those Saddams apart?), only that we feel the connection between our DNA and who we are as individuals to be remote. (He puts this better than I’m summarizing it.)

So, since I keep rejecting anti-digID arguments that say “I am not a number!”, I initially didn’t warm to AKMA’s line of thought. After all, a digID is like a passport. A passport declares who I am, but I don’t feel like it represents anything important about who I am as a person. The photo’s not even any good. But that’s not an objection to passports. (Hey. “Passport” might make a good name for a product in that space!)

But I find AKMA’s questions hard to ignore. He writes:

So this is what concerns me: if our identities become more and more remote from what we understand actually to be us, how does that change us? Do we want to set those changes in motion simply in order to use eBay and Amazon with more confidence, or perhaps to file taxes and vote online?

Answering these questions requires anticipating what life with digID’s will be like. To what extent will it be invisible, like our DNA? To what extent will it become our public face? To what extent will it require us to explicitly construct a variety of faces? Or will those faces just be sets of preferences that none but machines doth see? Will the preferred schemes that have users controlling their IDs require us to play with ourselves endlessly, tuning multiple personalities for every different class of entity with which we interact on the Internet? In short, to what extent will digital IDs be less like social security numbers and more like personae? It makes a big difference, albeit not to the task for which digID is explicitly designed. It “only” makes a difference to the how of our who on the Net.

(Note: I am the owner of the domain name “proxyself.com,” which I am willing to sell at an inflated price. Only naive buyers need apply.)

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An article by Carey Goldberg in the Boston Globe today discusses research on seeing:

”It used to be thought that perception was about us creating a copy of our environment inside our heads,” something like a recording videocamera, said Ron Rensink, a noted vision researcher at the University of British Columbia.

But now, he said, scientists increasingly realize that perception works more like a Web browser: People can take in and store only a tiny portion of the scene around them – just as only a bit of the Web fits onto one computer screen – but they can gain access to an enormous array of information by choosing to focus on any piece of it.

Ignoring the rather random use of a Web browser as an analogy, this further confirms what we already knew: as my dissertation advisor, Graeme Nicholson, says, seeing is reading, i.e., it’s an interpretive act. This is the point of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion as well, one of my all-time favorite books.

The Globe article (the link to which will rot in a few days) points to Rensink’s Web site where you can take some of the “change perception” tests yourself. Unfortunately, the link was broken as of 8:30am EDT this morning. But in searching for a replacement, I found a couple of excellent places. At AmoebaWeb there are tons of links to psychology articles and gadgets, including a link to some Flash animations by Mark Newbold that are kinda optical illusions. Not a replacement for Rensink’s page, but a very nice distraction. And isn’t that what the Web is all about?

John Rakestraw has the right address for Rensink’s site. Thanks!

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Let me begin with the standard-issue praise, which is no less sincere for being completely predictable: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By helped shape my thinking. Their book Philosophy in the Flesh is a truly fresh and mind-pivoting look at philosophy. I thank them for all that I’ve learned from them. (And now comes the “But…”)

But Dr. Lakoff’s most recent op-ed comes close to self-parody.

Lakoff has a superb eye for pointing out how what we take as straightforward, factual descriptions are in fact highly metaphorical — everything from talking about “high” notes to “straightforward” descriptions. He watches how these metaphors cluster (why are things that are “down” sad or mournful, and how does “falling” in love fit into that?) and convinces us that reality doesn’t lurk “behind” metaphors but is only understandable “through” metaphors.

In his new op-ed, Lakoff points to the metaphors we use in understanding the Iraqi war: The Nation as Person, the International Community with its “advanced” and “backward” nations, the war’s “gains” and “assets,” etc. It’s helpful to be reminded that when we say that the war isn’t against the Iraqi people, it’s against Saddam, even our smartest bombs aren’t listening to how we speak.

But pointing out that something is a metaphor just isn’t enough. The op-ed reads almost as if Lakoff is using a random quotation marks generator. Since all language and understanding is metaphorical, “you” can “slap” quotes “around” every “word” in “a” sentence. So, ok:

One of the most frequent uses of the Nation As Person metaphor comes in the almost daily attempts to justify the war metaphorically as a “just war.” The basic idea of a just war uses the Nation As Person metaphor plus two narratives that have the structure of classical fairy tales: The Self Defense Story and The Rescue Story.

Reduced to simple enough terms, everything is like everything else. But the question is: Is this a just war? Is it a war we should be waging? Lakoff says no: The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda is too tenuous for the war to be in self-defense, although he’s less clear about whether we’re actually rescuing the Iraqis. Agree or disagree, how does Lakoff’s presentation of our justifications as “stories” help? Why not just say that Bush says we’re in Iraq to defend ourselves from terrorist attacks because he believes that there’s a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Why frame this in terms of a fairy tale?

Certainly that framing suggests the story isn’t true. But if all understanding on such a scale is metaphorical — including Lakoff’s own — why isn’t labeling The Self Defense story a fairy tale just name-calling? In the op-ed, Lakoff says:

Millions of people around the world can see that the metaphors and fairy tales don’t fit the current situation, that Gulf War II does not qualify as a just war — a “legal” war

So, apparently, there’s a way to view “the current situation” outside of the frame of metaphors, seeing how the metaphor fits “the situation.” But Lakoff also writes:

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors — conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains — physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.

It is a common folk theory of progressives that “The facts will set you free!” If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.

(Hard or impossible? These two paragraphs seem to disagree. Anyway…) If facts won’t do it, then what will? Lakoff ends the piece — lamely, IMO — by suggesting how to build a progressive, anti-war movement:

First, the anti-war movement, properly understood, is not just, or even primarily, a movement against the war. It is a movement against the overall direction that the Bush administration is moving in. Second, such a movement, to be effective, needs to say clearly what it is for, not just what it is against.

Third, it must have a clearly articulated moral vision, with values rather than mere interests determining its political direction.

Isn’t the more consistent conclusion that the anti-war movement needs new stories, new metaphors, a new framing?

Perhaps Lakoff thinks that coming up with new metaphors is too hard, a job for poets that we cannot reasonably demand, nor can we wait for. If not metaphors and facts, what’s left? Values! Values apparently can do what facts cannot. But isn’t it a common folk theory of progressives that “The values will set you free!” If only you can get all the real values out there in the public eye, then every feeling person will reach the right conclusion.

I want to believe that. And yet I also have seen that the same values, the same human responses to suffering, result in radically different political outcomes. The same clips of the injured Iraqis in hospitals are used to dissuade us from war and to show us how compassionate we are towards the handful of unintended victims. The photos of AIDS sufferers in Africa are used to justify international charity, Christian outreach, denunciations of the World Bank and hatred of the regimes that have done too little. Shared values without shared metaphors and stories do not result in shared action.

I’d suggest that when George Soros, Strom Thurmond, Saddam Hussein and Sally Struthers can all point to the same suffering, the anti-war movement isn’t going to succeed by announcing its values. Rather, we really do need a new Story and new metaphors. That and globally connected communities, new leaders, and, yes, the shortcut of money.

(Thanks to Doc for the link, to AKMA for the reminder, and to Rainer Brockerhoff for the discussion.)

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This morning I woke up once again hoping to hear that Hussein is dead.

I am disturbed by my callousness. Up through my ‘twenties, I would have reminded myself that all life is precious and would have dredged up some sympathy for Hussein. I could probably still do it. I could get there by thinking about how his children would — will — react to his death. But it’d be a real effort. And it no longer seems helpful or important.

In fact, in hoping that Hussein is dead, I’m also acknowledging that I’d be willing to kill him. That’s not to say that I can imagine sneaking through Baghdad and pulling a trigger. But, I’d take my failure to kill him if given the opportunity to be moral weakness.

So, here’s my question: When I was in my ‘twenties, I’d have to work myself into feeling sympathy for someone like Hussein. Now I have to work myself into feeling bad about not feeling sympathy for someone like him. Is my callousness a sign that I’m making moral progress or that I’m slipping into the comfortable certitude of middle age?

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