A new post

So for a while now I have been trying to balance a new job, write some sci-fi short stories and to think some cool new thoughts about Kant. I have been doing well with the job, have some half-written stories and achieved very little on the Kantian front. But all is not lost.
As is my usual practice when I find something to be too difficult in philosophy, I don't do it. The result is that for the last couple of days I have suspended my efforts with Kant and begun the much easier and more fruitful exercises of re-reading Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" (BGE) and Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". Fantastic books. I'm finding Nietzsche to be a lot more accesible this time round and have been getting a great kick out of the sense of accomplishment that has come from finally being able to interpret this stuff at a decent level of competency.
While I have only just started reading Weber today, so far I am getting the impression that I will be able to read this ok too. It is definately not confusing the hell out of me (as was the case with Marx's "Capital") and from what I already know about Weber I suspect that I am not going to suddenly find myself plunged into a state of confusion after a promising start (as was the case with Schopenhauer). So my suspicion is that I will be able to strike upon some immediate results here.
And so far I am glad to be thinking about Weber and Simmel again. The little I read today has once again reinforced my opinion of these two guys. When learning sociology as an undergrad I often found that people would sometimes mention Weber when talking about the founding figures of the science and never did I hear anyone talk of Simmel (I only stumbled across Simmel by accident in my final year!). Most of the talk of classical sociology was given over to examing Marx and occasionally discussing the mistakes made by the likes of Comte and Durkheim. As I may have mentioned before I think this is a HUGE mistake. The focus should be taken off Marx and put onto Simmel and Weber. There are too many reasons to list here for why this is so but a simple one is worth mentioning here for now...
Weber's account of the cultural conditions which allowed capitalism to flourish is damn good. And it gives us an extra dimension that (so far) I haven't seen in Marx. And the best part is that it is a simple explanation: it is easy to understand, easy to psychologically digest, easy to agree with and easy to criticise. We don't need to perform the painful psychological contortions that are required to understand Marx and yet we can still account for the development of capitalism using Weber's analysis. This reason alone should put this text out in front for us (especially when trying to teach!) and I haven't even started on the other reasons like Weber and Simmel's immense value as philosophers, thier success with sociological predictions of 20th century developments and thier ability to keep pace with (or perhaps even out run?) the more sophistacated contemporary sociological texts. Not bad for a couple of guys who have been dead for near a hundred years...

Drawing up some more battle lines...

Her are a few more of the major threads of the thesis as it stands so far:
- As the fairy tale suggests I am relying on an account of rationality that is de-centered. This is to say that rationality is not the defining or most important thing that humans do.
- This view of rationality in turn is tied to an abandonment of the distinction between facts and values that is traditionally part of western academic thinking.
- This is (so far) a naturalist account. A lot is being said about naturalism at the moment by philosophers who are jumping on this band-wagon and I am still not sure if I agree with them entirely on this score. At the moment though it is safe to say that a heavy dose of Kantian realism is in the mix. The best account of naturalism that I know of can be found in the work of Roy Bhaskar, even though I think his account of what Kant and Hume were saying is a little dubious.
- As already mentioned this thesis will be heavily critical of what some people consider to be major 20th C philosophies. Included inthe firing line are post-modernism, existentialism and that deconstructionist loser, Derrida.
-This will also be critical of traditional psychology. Although it may turn out that I don't have any more content to say on this matter than Foucault did.
- Also as already mentioned I will be critical of a lot of commonly held myths about people and society but also of commonly held misconceptions about science, art and history.
- And finally (in case I haven't mentioned it enough already) I will be attempting to draw connections from Kant through to Simmel and Weber and then on to Foucault and the recent developments in cognitive science.

The idea is a big and complex one. One attempt at giving a nutshell account is to say that I am trying to give an account of sociology that situates it within a realist/naturalist theory and blurs the boundaries between sociology, cognitive science, biology and history (and probably a few other things besides). This blurring of the boundaries is necessary as per the tennants of naturalism, it will overcome some of the limitations of sociology and give a more accurate account of the world.
My intuition is that this can be achieved by attending to the developments of ideas from Kant through to Simmel and Weber and then through to late 20th C sociology and cognitive science. Of course there are many connections that can be made with/attached to these developments but I think that this progression is the main thread that needs to be established for this task.
What is more...attending to this main thread will help us muck out the philosophical stables. That is, we will be able to demythologize a lot of mistakes made by modern thinkers along the way. Among these are the above listed philosophical targets (post-modernism, existentialsim, etc) but they also include a lot of pre-conceptions and conclusions that are attached to academic pursuits (the sciences in particular) and a lot of general cultural assumptions.

Rationality: A fairy tale.

Please excuse my gross Euro-centric oversimplification:

Once upon a time some humans noticed that they could do things with their heads. When they closed their eyes they could imagine places, shapes and even weird abstract things like numbers. What's more is that they could use these ideas to solve problems and make their lives better. They called this thinking. When they talked to each other about thinking they quickly discovered that some of them were better at it than others. They called the people who were better at it, rational. When they looked around them, they noticed that they couldn't see much evidence of thinking in any other creatures and there was certainly no evidence of rationality. So they said "the rest of the world is shite because they can not have rational thoughts like us!"

A long time passed. The humans continued to use rationality to improve their lives. They built cities, made laws, farmed crops, waged wars, cured diseases and did some really hard sums. Then one day (perhaps it was the 17th or 18th century) some of the humans started to work on an idea. They said "Hey! why don't we use rationality to arrange everything that goes on in our lives!" Some of the other humans thought this sounded like a great idea while the rest of the humans just shrugged their shoulders and said "aright then". So the humans started to work on building really rational cities, farming really rational crops, waging really rational wars, curing really rational diseases and doing some really rational hard sums.

A long time passed. Then one day (in the 20th century) some of the humans started to say "Hey! does anyone else notice we aren't being rational anymore?". Most of the other humans just shrugged their shoulders and and said "nope, hadn't noticed". But the rest of the humans started arguing, some said that they were still being rational while others agreed that they weren't being rational anymore. And so the humans who thought they weren't being rational anymore started to say some very strange things that nobody else could understand while the humans that thought they were still being rational sat down and started to think some really rational thoughts about being rational.....

Why am I thinking about society?

So why am I giving a damn about social fallacies? There are several answers to this question. One reason is that I think it is interesting, but that's no surprise since I did invest a decent chunk of time out of my life to studying this stuff.

Another reason, one of which will already be obvious to those of you who have studied Hume, is that I am warming up. The language used in the previous post is clearly something I have pinched from Hume, I am just applying it to a different set of problems. However I think this is an important reason and my motive here is not just to get Humean thoughts firing in my own skull. If you are taking part in this blog then I am also hoping that you will get into the skeptical swing of things when it comes to thinking about society. If we are at least attempting to get on the same page in this regard then maybe it will help prevent us from getting bogged down in pedantic arguments about this or that particularity of social existence. Don't get me wrong, these arguments are fine and something that I often enjoy taking part in. But they may detract from the big picture when it comes to achieving what I want with this blog.

And "what I want with this blog" brings me to another reason for starting this conversation. In my thesis I have a lot to say about social sciences. One of the things I want to say is that sociology is an unavoidably Kantian pursuit. As such I think a good understanding of Kant's philosophy will not only help us to sort out some of the mess that has occured in sociology but also make us much better sociologists while we are at it. The reason I use the phrase, "I want to say" this is that I can't say it yet. This is one of the points that I want to clarify, perhaps via venting some ideas (and hopefully brainstorming with others) on this blog. Once I can say this, my intuition is also suggesting to me that we will be able to follow the same path with a lot of other social sciences and perhaps clear up a lot of confusion that has occured in other sticky fields as well. However this is no small task. It takes ages to be a decent Kantian philosopher and there will also be a stack of issues that will be needed to be dealt with in order to proove the unavoidable reliance on Kant's philosophy by sociology.

SO this then (hopefully!) would be the first major statement from my thesis to appear on the blog: engaging in sociology requires and unavoidable reliance on Kant's philosophy.

Thinking about society.

If I do ever manage to write a few books I imagine that I will be including a section in all of them that is something like this one. One of the reasons for this is because thinking about society is so dreadfully important to us. When discussing society and culture it never seems to take too long before someone is getting ticked off about some issue or another. Another reason is because I made the unfortunate choice of philosophizing about society and culture and this seems to almost automatically put me at odds with about 97% of the people I meet. Yes this may indeed mean you dear reader. So it is in this section (and it's subsequent generations) that I want to contend that a lot of people make extremely gross mistakes when thinking about human behaviour, especially when said humans are hanging around in groups. And yes even though it can be incredibly hard for us to admit, we should probably all bite the bullet on this one and admit that we are most likely guilty. After all the list of myths we have dreamed up when thinking about ourselves is a long and glorious one, take these few examples for instance:

-people of different races (especially the non-white ones) are less capable of intelligent thought, moral goodness and/or civilized behaviour
-Jewish people are all servants of Satan
-witches live in Salam
-thin people are happier
-women suffer from weird diseases like hysteria and nymphomania (ugh! girl germs!)
-having blond hair and blue eyes really does make you a better person
-everyone is either male or female
-sodomy makes God angry
-when men are aggresive it's because of testosterone
-cartoons are just for kids
-a woman's place is in the kitchen
-the entire war on masturbation at the end of the 19th C
-the entire war on drinking at the beginning of the 20th C
-the entire war on pot-smoking and listening to jazz that came just after that
-the entire war on communism that came after that
-the entire war on terrorism that came after that (is there a pattern here?)
-George W. Bush would make a great president

And I'm sure we could go on. So what are we to do in the face of our rampant fallacies when it comes to thinking about ourselves and the people around us? The obvious thing to do would be to look for whatever is causing our misconceptions and fix the problem. So what is the cause? At this point it is tempting (and in some circles popular) to respond to this question with a well reasoned speech about how it is difficult to understand society while we are located within it (since each of us can only see a small part of it at any one time) and that it is only by attaining a view of society from the outside that we will be able to see it in its entirety and thus gain the holistic understanding we need to tackle our problems. On this view we are very much like Neo, unable to find an answer to his question until he has left the matrix behind and can veiw it from afar. These types of answers might have some merit but these days my intuition is usually leading me to say that such answers are rubbish. I'm more inclined to think that the cause of our generating so many myths about ourselves lies with our understanding (or misunderstanding) of causality, especially when it comes to extending notions of causality to things social and psychological. This is to say that we are regularly making mistakes about what the causes and effects of human behaviour are. This view also leads to the unfortunate conclusion that the remedy to our situation is a lot of hard work (damn it!!). What we need to do is examine each of our beliefs in turn, critically examine the causal relationships that we attribute to them and adjust our view of the world according to the results of our examination. So far it sounds like we need to adopt a very Humean stance when it comes to thinking about society. But don't worry, hopefully I can talk us out of this rut soon enough.

A brief introduction

As the note at the beginning says this blog is here as part of my attempt to come to terms with Kantian philosophy. As such I will be venting a few ideas here to see how they sound, testing some of the details, listening to contributions and criticisms (should anyone feel like raising any) and hopefully refining my account of these theories. So this is meant to be a kind of stomping ground to assist in writing my first ever honest-to-goodness post-grad thesis. However I should point out that I don't intend what I write here to be taken as anything even remotely close to high brow academic text. Far from it. Part of my success will depend on my being able to explain myself to as many people as possible. So I want to be making statements that are as clear and as easy to follow as possible under the circumstances. And as most of my colleagues know, I do have a strong tendency to try and cram even the most convoluted and sophisticated of theories into common everyday speak. Probably so that I can still say it when I am drunk. Thus if you do feel like contributing to this blog then aside from providing the well thought out and insightful questions, observations and criticisms of which I am sure you are more than capable, it would also be constructive to hear comments like "Wot's that bit mean?". Hopefully this will prompt me to try and thin out the academic-speak a little more and start speaking in plain English.

A further note that should be made concerns a not uncommon side-effect of debating philosophy. Believe it or not, there have been several instances during the history of philosophy where people have taken offence. This may be due to their revulsion at the content of what is being said ("NO Jesus does NOT hate me!") or because they have felt that someones rebuttal of their opinion was unduly harsh, disrespectful, degrading or otherwise personally insulting ("Well I don't think you needed to say it like THAT"). For myself and on behalf on everyone who writes something here, if you are someone who, at some stage, does take offence please try to remember that our efforts here are not a personal attack on you. I know that this can sometimes be difficult for some people given the nature of some of the subject matter of philosophy. However even though I know the dangers involved I want to press on regardless and risk the impending wrath of the mob. So if you do find yourself getting hot under the collar with myself or any other contributor here then I advise that you 1) take a break from this blog for a while, come back after you have cooled off; 2) stay angry and write your retort but remember that your comments may still be methodically picked to pieces by your antagonist thus making you even more angry; 3) abuse the crap out of me if it makes you feel better, I'm big and tuff so I can take it; 4) prepare some hemlock and wait for a sympathetic council to bring the offending party to justice.

Introductions over. Let's get on with it.