Ontological Comedian, or What I Learned Today

After a Long Absence

2006-05-10T17:21:00.002-07:00

What constitutes my being these days?

I'm an online bookseller, struggling to make it pay decently.

It often seems like I'm just shuffling around; as for intellectual life, I pick up a book, read it for a while, then go on to another, and maybe back on another day to a previous one. It feels pretty aimless. Every now and then I go to a history seminar and get somewhat inspired. I hope to say something useful to the speaker.

Books looked at recently: have almost read to the end Pandaemonium by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Seems like very good ruminations on the influence of ethnicity on recent history, and how ethnicity has been given short shrift in political analysis. Marxism has focused on economic class as the Rosetta Stone of history. Liberalism has believed too much in the rational individual, and market forces, which are seen as largely benign. Enough for now on Pandaemonium.

Not too long ago I was readhing Thomas Browne, a physician in the time of Cromwell and the Restoration. This was influenced by the course I took over a year ago on the History of Communication, an experience that turned out badly, as due to the difficulty of making a living, I found myself at a critical point in the class, unable to spend time writing a paper, which led to one more incomplete. If I ever salvage my graduate school career, it will take almost a miracle.

I also read, with some pleasure, On the Shoulders of Giants by Robert Merton, a playful exploration of Newton's saying "If I see far, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants and its antecedents, perhaps going back to the classical era -- certainly going far back into medieval times.

For entertainment, I've read Depth Takes a Holiday by Sandra Tsing Loh. It is for some reason one of a couple of dozen books that seem to be climbing the stairs, trying to escape the basement or "book dungeon".

Not long ago I was working on scripts or programs to identify past customers most worth contacting to make suggestions about books I have that they might want, and to facilitate finding books related to those they'd ordered in the past, but where in the million files on my computer IS that code? I have no idea. I pulled out of that sort of work abruptly to bail out the ship by putting lots of books on line.

After a Long Absence

2006-05-10T17:21:00.001-07:00

After a Long Absence

2006-05-10T17:21:00.000-07:00

Literary Theory, An Introduction by Terry Eagleton

2005-12-29T06:55:00.000-08:00

Very readible esp. considering the subject matter. The endnotes could be more informative; sometimes a quotation is cited from a secondary source, giving no idea when the statement was originally made.

Begins with a discussion of "What is literature", then on to how and why "English" became an academic discipline. The explanations are very specific to Great Britain; just how analogous the U.S. case would be isn't clear. In the 19th century (says Eagleton), a replacement was needed for religion as a civilizing (or pacifying?) influence, especially on the masses. This no doubt is less true in the U.S. as religion was not on the decline here so much as in Britain (if at all).

Probably every movement in literary theory is strongly related to capitalism, according to this book. Sometimes a trend is said to start out as a critique of the status quo, but ultimately be found to be all to supportive of it.

[to be continued'

Berger's Sacred Canopy

2005-12-28T15:28:00.000-08:00

Gottttta blog! Anyway, gotta write for therapy against my mind turning to mush, a process well underway that I hope I can still reverse.

It has seemed like time to read some of those nearly incomprehensible 'seminal' works, like for instance Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy. Berger has one of the worst prose styles I've encountered, IMHO. I open the book at a random point and look for an illustration. At the bottom of p14

"The world of social objectivations, produced by externalizing consciousness, confronts consciousness as an external facticity"

What's being said here? That any socially coherent group of people makes up some shared interpretation of the world around us (and can that process be called "externalizing consciousness"? "Consciousness" suggests the goings on inside an individual mind [it being hard to conceive of any sort of mind but an individual one], and somehow that consciousness gets secreted outside myself, and then confronts me, like the dreamed beings coming to life in Stanislov Lem's Solaris? (and lovingly(?) parodied in the 1st season of "Red Dwarf").

Whenever one (<== and that word hides a lot of handwaving) tries to explore the idea of being in a deep way, the being that is my consciousness cries out for attention in the most irrepressible way. If I consider the "being" of a rock, there is the rock that I saw on the ground earlier today, but there is also the rock that I dreamed of last night, and "common sense" (the common sense of my particular culture, anyway, which just suggests how difficult it is to start by contemplating nothing but my own consciousness) tells me that at least the "dreamed of" rock, is susidiary to my personal being, or consciousness.

[to be continued]

The Uses of Pseudo-realism

2005-12-25T14:52:00.000-08:00

Beware the man who flatters you by saying he's not going to flatter you because you're too smart for that.

Smart persuaders often bank on one's image of oneself as being 'realistic', 'unromantic', etc. If someone is trying to sell you something and says it's a bargain, you'll want to know what's in it for him, and a good salesman will have a good cover story, like the car salesman who says "I just have to make this one more sale by tomorrow to win a trip to Hawaii."

Purveyers of political philosophies, from Randians to Republicans to Marxists will tell you "We're just hard-headed realists, unlike those sentimental utopian Marxists, Democrats, or Saint-Simoneans (or Social Democrats)."

[to be continued]

Apologia - the Art of Putting Oneself in Context for Others

2005-03-13T00:22:00.000-08:00

Let me begin directly with the main point. An apologia for the choice of a title can be given later.

OK, so I have this sort of being which I call subjectivity. I might say which is called subjectivity, but that presupposes a network of individuals(!?) discoursing on the word "subjectivity", who have ever thought about me; or maybe it just tries to imagine what would happen if some part of that network of discourse ever did stop and notice, and think (or discourse) about me.

So, to resume, I have this sort of being I call subjectivity; that is, I know something of a network of discourse on "subjectivity", that I suspect can be related to this internal state that I'm trying to focus on right now.

So I have my personal being (call it "PB", in reference to "PC" for "personal computer, PDA for Personal D(ata?) Assistent, etc.), and hypothesize some "you" who is reading this.

In an apologia in the sense used by Plato to denote Socrates defense in the trial for his life, I, the apologizer may wish to induce you to experience my sense of what I am, or have been, up to.

In the more modern sense of apology, I may want to do that, but that is more what we call excusing ourselves, but though as with Socrates it responds to your sense of being injured by me (which isn't always the case with apologia in general), with the apology proper, I convey a sense that I empathize with your experience of being injured by me, and that I simply regret that. Both senses involve an attempt to share subjetivity in one direction or the other.

Personal Ontology

2005-02-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

The "being" of rocks and such may not be all that interesting (tho some would dispute it), but the question "What am I" involves us ("us" - now there's another word to conjure with) in complexities galore.

Should I think of my "being" in terms of my consciousness from birth to death? Of course I only have access to a small portion of that. Before some age I remember nothing. And presently, I know nothing of the future. Anyway, am "I" really just this brief spark in "geological time". Some cannot help thinking that their being is eternal. They must account somehow for our inability to see beyond this "present" life -- or they may deny this inability; say that they do remember their past lives, or that they have been to the "afterlife" and come back to tell about it.

Then there are the hypotheticals. Suppose I could be duplicated by some machine (not even conceivable I suppose if one denies the material basis of conscious life). What would one "me" say to the other? What would that experience be like?

Googling the Ontological Comedian

2005-02-20T02:52:00.000-08:00

I'm very disturbed to find that, after over 2 weeks, I still can't find anything when I google "ontological comedian". What's become of all-inclusiveness of google? Is it making value judgement, maybe due to 'payola' or other commercial considerations? Or is it's 'scan cycle' longer than I'd have imagined?

Or does blogspot hide (on fail to disclose) its contents by simply not providing a table of links to the various blogs in a known place? But didn't I create my own static link to it?

A Sampler of Ontological Comedy on the Web

When I google ontological and comedian as 2 words (no quotes), it's a very different matter. There are 931 (English) hits, including:

<>A 57 page paper in PDF format called "Knowledge Artifacts" by George Goodall, which refers to George Carlin "famously" stating that there are two types of matter: "stuff" and "shit". My "stuff" would quite likely be interpreted by someone else as "shit" if it were to accumulate in that person's basement. Goodall writes very prolifically in blog style at http://www.deregulo.com/facetation/, with entries running right up to yesterday as I write this.
A profile of Ricky Gervais, creater of the British TV series, "The Office", which I haven't seen but am now intrigued by.

This is Merely Existing - not Living

2005-02-03T19:31:00.000-08:00

This is Merely Existing - not Living. That's the sort of thing some of my generation used to say when we were young, real young, High School age, when we went to liberal church camps and sang folk songs around the campfire.

What would an existentialist think of such a statement. One of the problems is that words of this sort always wander in their meanings. Deprecating "mere existence" would be a strange way for someone calling themself an existentialist to talk, yet we might reasonably understand them as really "live" and not merely "exist" -- at least in a 1960s liberal teen-ager's understanding of those terms.

When I went looking for a decent definition of ontology and settled on the 'wikopedia' version, their first illustration of an ontological problem was "Do all nouns refer to entities?", and they assert that Platonist philosophers tend to say "yes", but others would say that "society" for example isn't an entity, but only refers to some sort of collection of persons.

A very different sort of exploration is the question whether there are fundamentally different ways of being as a human being. What would qualify as fundamental? Might this involve mere pretentiousness, or the manipulation of words that elicit highly emotional reactions from people -- perhaps for questionable purposes?

There are many ways to try to speak about this. "Higher consciousness" is a favorite phrase, or just "consciousness", or enlightenment. Many "masters" have a recurrent theme of putting us on our guard against making a fetish of the sonorous word or phrase. The great ontological comedian Werner Erhard used to like to say "You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground", implying that that might be an important distinction he was about to impart. Not as nice, for some people, as being promised the "beautific vision", or nirvana, etc. Zen Masters sometimes spoke of the "stink of Zen".

Is there a way of being (not a kind of being -- you need a certain gravitas, which way has and kind doesn't) -- a way of being, compared to which what I'm doing right now is a sort of passive, unconscious thing, just allowing myself to be pushed along?

Does true being, or really living mean something like "the creative life?" If so, what does it take to be really creative? We see generations of artists dismissing their predecessors as uncreative. Take a look at How to Draw a Bunny, the movie about Ray Johnson, for an extreme example of a different sort of being. You might say he was a profoundly playful man. Is play the essence of "real being"? Some will say it is fierce commitment. Are they somehow the same thing?

One reason I'm doing this blog is to help make play a more central part of my life.

Another sort of play for me is to get onto some beautiful wild trails, on cross-country skis, or just on foot. Anyway, moving through an unexpected world -- going someplace just because I'm drawn to it. Most of the time I seem to be running around in circles pursuing goals that seem urgently necessary for survival, and it is hard, and might seem foolish, not to put those survival goals first, but I find myself growing indifferent and hence weaker. Next, perhaps, I must beware the trap of doing just enough "real living" to keep the machine charged up with a certain amount of spirit -- treating my self as a means.

Who Am I Calling a Comedian?

2005-02-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Who Am I Calling a Comedian?

Certainly not Bill Clinton, who seems neither very funny nor philosophical, however inadvertantly funny he was on that one occasion.

Prince Hamlet has a better claim, whose best known words are "To be or not to be, that is the question", and was also quite the madcap comedian, being "but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."

I first had some idea of ontology put in my face by the likes of Werner Erhard and Fernando Flores, who certainly did whatever it is that they did largely by making people laugh. I overcame some initial skepticism about Erhard by reading his biography written by William Bartley, who previously wrote a biography of Wittgenstein, and in later years was an important interpretor of Karl Popper. Wittgenstein deserves consideration as an ontological comedian. Popper doesn't as far as I can tell. In the first years of the "est training" (I came in at the end of "the training", in 1983) I doubt there was much talk of ontology or anything of the sort. Though Bartley observed some philosophical sophistication in it, he couldn't see where it was coming from -- i.e. Erhard seemed like an untutored original to him.

Fernando Flores life seems like a real shaggy dog story. A Chilean, he had been at about the age of 30 (by my estimate), a minister in the Allende government, in charge of the "largest project in applied cybernetics" ever, or something like that. Now what does that even mean? Then the coup happenned and he was in a Pinochet prison for some years; he was I think released through the offices of Amnesty International. Somehow he wound up in California being a doctoral student of Hubert Dreyfus, a major interpretor of postmodern continental philosophers at least major by U.S. standards (and his books seems rather sane and readible even when the subject is Michel Foucault, say). Flores got his doctorate with a short thesis on the use of computers to manage work flow(!). I suspect John Austin's How to do Things with Words and Searle's Speech Acts pointed somewhat in the direction in which he went.

Anyway, from applied cybernetics to applied philosophy, so it seems. Having been somewhat immersed in it, applied philosophy makes some sense to me, while applied cybernetics sounds either scary or nonsensical. Later, Flores went in with a very famous computer scientist and founded Action Technologies, whose Groupware system, The Coordinator, became, for a while, a genuine competitor to Lotus Notes (after starting out very small, being marketed on something of an Amway-like model; it was popular with folks who toted early Compaq portable PCs, and its networking model was very close to the earliest UNIX email and UUNET models).

It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is

2005-02-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

Here is one definition of ontology, courtesy of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The most fundamental branch of metaphysics. It is the study of being or existence as well as the basic categories thereof--trying to find out what entities and what types of entities exist. Ontology has strong implications for the conceptions of reality.

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" - Bill Clinton.

But seriously, folks, for all the cries of "What idiot has a problem with the word 'is'?", ...
contemplation of the word "is", or "to be", and its conjugations, synonyms and semi-synonyms, is something you could spend your life doing, and/or drive yourself crazy with, and it has spawned all manner of philosophical disciplines and crack pot movements (and driven me to wonder whether I can tell the difference between the two, or whether there is (there's that word again) a difference). Of course it's also the subject of Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be."

One extreme reaction to the contemplation of "being" has been to name a school of philosophy, "existentialism". Another is the claim, associated with Alfred Korzybski, David Bourland and Albert Ellis, that a big step toward solving the world's problems would be to abolish all forms of "to be" from the language (See "Towards Understanding E-Prime").

Would David Bourland agree that "to exist" is synonymous with "to be"? His bette noire of a verb "to be" is hopelessly mired in "medieval Aristotelian essentialism"; perhaps though, "existence" would be seen differently. Anyway, Korzybski blamed much on the legacy of Aristotle (as many have done before him and many will no doubt do again); not surprising since attempts to intervene in mankind's attitudes towards ontology must nearly always grapple with figures as far back as Sophocles, Aristotle's spiritual grandfather.