Ethics: Racism & Multiculturalism

As we discussed last time, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 there was a shift in American culture powered by movements against sexism and racism. Today there remains much prejudice but it is covert, not overt. This means that the majority of prejudice is invisible to the privileged while a constant uphill battle to the marginalized. If you are marginalized and you point out covert racism, you are often accused of overt racism by privileged people. If you are privileged, you are accused

The best evidence against both sexism and racism is the French psychologist Piaget’s studies of Child developmental stages. Children of both genders and all ethnicities go through the same four stages of development at the same ages (1, 3, 7 and 11). Another great piece of evidence against racism in particular is an experiment where they gave urban American and rural African kids laptops and found that there was no difference in the learning times for basic games.

One of my favorite subjects is teaching against eurocentrism in academics. While the laptop experiment suggests that we all learn and think similarly regardless of culture, one of the central messages in education in America and Europe is that we belong to a special culture called “the West” which is superior to other civilizations, particularly in regards to reason and freedom. Often examples from ancient Greece are used to illustrate this superiority, and then the focus becomes modern Europe (ignoring all other cultures and the thousands of years in between the cultures of ancient Greece and modern Europe). This situation, which many like myself call eurocentric (and thus ignorant), is very recent. It came about in the last three hundred years in the wake of European success and dominance of the world. Before that time, Greeks, Romans and Europeans did not describe themselves as “the West”, nor did they claim to be superior in terms of reason or freedom relative to all other civilizations.

Greek civilization is indebted to Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian and Indian thought. Rome has been the ‘father’ of Christian Europe since the Roman Empire conquered much of Western Europe and converted them to Roman Catholic Christianity. How did the Greeks come to be the Grandfathers of civilization? How did the myth of “the West” happen?

The Italians, though lighter than the Romans from constant invasions from the north (the Fall of Rome and afterward), were convinced in each city state that they were the Romans, and so they depicted the Romans like themselves. They also read Greek to read the Christian bible (written in Latin and Greek) and so they depicted the Greeks as looking like the Romans. However, it was not until the late 1700s early 1800s that the Greeks were conceived as the origin of European civilization and the birthplace of rationality and modern politics. This coincides with what Hannaford tells us about the formation of racism.

This is the theory that we can disprove but we still believe, and enshrine in museums, textbooks and most importantly, fictional and nonfictional TV and movies. The last has the greatest effect. What you see your culture present is much more important than an academic argument. The eyes are much harder to doubt than the ears or the structure of an argument. (Consider: Mel Gibson having an all white cast speak Aramaic for “historical accuracy” in The Passion).

It surprises many to learn that the term “the West” came largely into use in the years following WWII, after the Holocaust showed terrible anti-Semitism. Before WWII, academics freely used the term ‘European Race’ to describe the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, and modern Europeans equally. After the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, the term became an eyesore. Academics began increasingly referring to this “race” as “The West.

All sorts of ridiculous statements in the first paragraphs of philosophy and history books show us this, where the Greeks are ‘the birthplace of reason’ without context. One of my favorite examples is the British historian who stated in the 50s that the most important event in British history was the battle at Marathon (holding out the Persian ‘Orientals’, who as Wolf points out were paying Greeks to fight the Athenians and Spartans, as they had done with the Athenians and Spartans in the past). Marathon is often cast as the birth of “the West”, even though no one, including the ancient Greeks, used the term until after WWII.


Hannaford’s Race: The History of an Idea in the West

Race seems obvious today, a fact of biology. There seem to be distinct ethnic groups that are easily divisible into recognizable races. Hannaford argues that in fact racism rose with science and modernity in the rise of Europe since the 1600s. There was, of course, always ethnocentrism (my tribe is familiar, your tribe over the hill is scary) that correspond to self-centered thinking on an individual level, but ‘black’ and ‘white’ people did not always exist. In English, ‘ras’ meant a course or current (show branching tree form, trace one branching as a ‘race’). The word did not mean a fully separate category of people until after 1700, as Europeans got wealthy beyond everyone and very successful with sciences. Today research on genetics shows that there is no definable or divisible races that can be fully separated. Rather, there is a tangle of genetic material that is mostly common to a people.

The Greeks hated Barbarians (like the Slavs, Germans and even the Romans at first) but considered the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Persians to be civilized and were trying to imitate them and consider themselves thus civilized. Plato and Herodotus loved Egypt and considered it the root of all civilization (Timaeus) and Aristotle thought Mesopotamia was the first civilization and the birthplace of science and philosophy. Greece, like ancient Israel, was caught between these two great empires. Plato argued against ethnocentrism to give the Greeks credit as a civilized people. Aristotle argued that the Germans could never be civilized because they were an inferior race.

There is evidence that the Chinese may have been the first to consider certain women ‘white people’ (think Geishas of Japan). Soon after this the Persians were the first to consider themselves ‘white people’ in these words (‘Whites vs. the Blacks’ play by Persian playwright). Just as European civilization got most everything from Islamic civilization, including most of the texts of Plato and Aristotle, Europe could have easily gotten it’s ‘white race’ from Islam (many of whom, like top-caste Indians, still call themselves ‘white’).

Ethnic conflict was originally between Religions, not races. Thus, Europeans were not white, but ‘Christians’, and they were prejudiced and afraid of Jews and Muslims (1492, the re-conquest of Spain, the Inquisition, and Columbus, and BLUE BLOOD). As Europe developed, race came to be a solidified concept, backed by Science & History (as Barthes calls them, the two great myths). This is when historians made the Greeks and Romans part of ‘the European Race’, as opposed to the Jewish race, the Mohamedian race, the African race, and others. Often, these were paired with colors in common speak but not always. Eventually, German historians and anthropologists centered their study on Nordic and Aryan race as origin of Greek civilization, ancient Israel, and thus the civilizing force of mankind. Kant’s On the Different Races of Men (1775, one year before the Declaration of Independence), says that there are fully separable races and mixing is bad as it degrades the quality of a race.

This thinking has dominated European thought until only recently, and it remains covert within academic understandings today. After the Holocaust, white Christians and Ashkenaz Jews could no longer speak of ‘European Race’ comfortably, so Europe became ‘The West’ over a period of time. We still speak this way today, thought we all know ‘West’ means ‘white’.

Famous joke about European nations’ strengths and faults:
In Heaven, the police are British, the chefs are Italian, the mechanics are German, the lovers are French and everything is organized by the Swiss.
In Hell, the police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.
This old joke shows us that Europeans did not consider themselves to be a single race with a single character until very recently. In America, where European peoples blended together to make “white” people, these differences disappeared while color based racism remains today.

Great Moments in American Racism:
The Jews and Muslims are best shown in the 1492 example (killing Jews upside-down, lending).
The Treatment of the Native Americans (reservations today).
The African Slave trade, jim crow and black marginalized communities today.
The taking of Latin America by America, Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, and domination today.
The Chinese exclusion act and post WWII ‘Asian Problem’ (dragon lady syndrome).

Bill O’Reilly went to a restraint with Al Sharpton, and said on the radio that black people have gotten very civilized in the last year or so. Roland Marin, correspondent for CNN says: obviously (bill O’Reilly) doesn’t hang out with many black people.

Racism in America Today:

Black and Latino people are 3 times likelier to be poor, on average earn 40% less that the average white person and have ONE TENTH the net worth.

Racial profiling by police criminalizes the marginalized, keeping them marginal (DWB).

Redlining is the practice of not lending to particular people or selling new homes to let people get out of certain areas based on the area from which they apply.

In the 1940s most white people supported segregation. In 1970, one fourth did. Now, it is estimated that 20-50% of white people agree with racist stereotypes openly, and often do not think of this as racist but rather simple observation of culture and reality (like O’Reilly).

Racism has real costs: study in the American Journal of Health estimated that “over 886,00 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had the same health care as white Americans”, stemming from lack of sufficient insurance, poor services, and reluctance to seek care (that is almost a million man march in itself).

In the last article in your reader, called White Privilege, there is a great list that spells out what privileged vs. marginalized means in terms of racism in America today. White people can be in the company of other white people in most environments, can move and travel without fear, can shop without being harassed, can hear about their people’s achievements and how it makes the world a better place while being educated and entertained, can swear and dress in old clothes without people thinking white people are stupid or evil, do not have to speak for their race in particular (remember the Myth of the Model Minority article), can criticize the government and our way of life without fear of becoming an alien, can get pulled over or audited without fear of discrimination, and can get medical and legal help without fear of discrimination.

The media does not cover racism or talk about it as a problem at all, just like the Democratic party (including Obama if you listen to his campaign speeches). Just days ago, there was a study published by Brandeis University in Boston that got coverage by the British newspaper the Guardian and many left leaning websites (many who quoted the Guardian article) but got NO COVERAGE by CNN, the Chronicle, The LA Times, or the Chicago Tribune. The NY Times mentioned the study in the economics blog, which is in the opinion section and not considered an official article. The study shows that even as class differences have widened, white people have made five times the economic gains that black people have made across all economic groups. The study shows that not only have the economic policies of the last 25 years favored the rich and privileged, but that racism is a real economic barrier to black and latino people.

On a final note, we must consider the legislation in Arizona right now. Many are now aware of the “breathing while latino” law that would require police to question latino people they suspect of being illegal immigrants. There is another law, however, that was signed by the Arizona governor making it illegal for any course in a public school to “advocate ethnic solidarity”. The law is aimed at teachers who teach their students about latino cultural heritage and the brutality that latinos endure in America. The governor says that these teachers are racist and are telling their latino students, falsely, that latinos are an oppressed minority. The bill starts off saying it is illegal for teachers to “promote the overthrow of the United States government”, and then shifts to saying that it is equally illegal to teach classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people”.

Intro Philosophy: Lewis Carroll & The Alice Books

LEWIS CARROLL was born 1832, and taught at Christ Church College at Oxford from college there (1851) to his death (1898). He lectured on logic and math. He wrote the Alice books for Alice and her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having conversations. He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and chess. He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.

He was especially fond of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter how you say it). This became an issue in the 1930s, where in America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a pedophile. Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time, and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College). It is thought today by scholars that the family broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble enough.

Many have tried to crack his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath. Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic. Others say that there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense. There are things there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.

There are repeated themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books. Carroll took Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious consequences. Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught, hands folded, but strange tales come out. This is paralleled by having ideals and rules but living in the all too human world. It mocks the way that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.

Carroll was fascinated by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear “music standing on its head”. Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries. The best political example: Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids. An example from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being upset with her is not real either. Alice in beginning of LG says that she could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be deceptive set up. If we are kind to someone else who we get something from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception. Is this real or not? Likely it is both mixed together, seen from two different and opposite perspectives.

In many ways, the imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality. For example, consider the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern thought considering mental objects and consciousness. The being of a unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one thing, really so. However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one wants. One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas if there is not a horse you have to go find one so you can passively just have it whether you are thinking about it or not. (Consider the red queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can just to stay in place). Mental objects are ideal, just what they are, while real objects are always imperfect and temporary. Remember that in ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.

There are many quotes from the books on Logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes life itself less than the ideal:

Studying Logic, “will give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle – the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p xvii)

“And so you think, do you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by other people are correct? I only wish it were! Society would be much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that are scattered broadcast over the world were correct! But it is all the other way , I fear. For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and, even when the Premisses are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p 32)

“The Logicians…speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)

“You will find these seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular, universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic. Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”

If you go through the answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims, “Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.


Sylvie and Bruno Limerick (note the many types of non-being)

He thought he saw a rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.


THE ALICE BOOKS

Alice travels to wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming. In both places she encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them. The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and dogs. We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in order that they appear in the two books.


Alice in Wonderland

This was first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title. In this book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground. In the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror. Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and imagination together as thought.
Alice is thinking about whether or not to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end) falls asleep. She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind with reason, imagination, and memory. She follows the white rabbit until she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she fell asleep and into a dream world.

Alice passes all sorts of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls. All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason and memory but not real things that they hold and represent. Alice thinks that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who walk on their hands upside-down. Notice the reversal of the real by reason and imagination.

She falls into an underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall. Here we have the small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table. This is somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and particular. When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table. When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’ we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of these as slippery ice). When we think about someone or ourselves, it is easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments . Alice will get to this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in a court game of croquet.

Throughout this, Alice is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the things she does. This is the classic paradox of identity that philosophers today in American Analytics argue about. Remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought experiment. Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be denied. While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann. When she enters the house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real Mary Ann. So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.

When she encounters the Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest. Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must be some kind of serpent. Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic, deductive reasoning here. The problem is that the world is complex and simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.

Meeting the Duchess in her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it. Then Alice takes the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.


Alice at the Mad Tea Party

There is an interesting bridge between Carroll and Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of the Mad Tea Party. Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians who did their teaching and publishing in England. Russell met Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his successor. Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of types in moving to his later views. Russell’s close circle of Trinity college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun by many contemporaries. In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel. Wiener also pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness to the Dormouse. Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.

Russell famously stated: “Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”. There is no better statement to illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form. The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things. Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue. The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.

Among scholars there is consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s nonsense play. Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi). Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky. Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of (Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”. Warren Shibles includes a philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969). In Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself, as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight. In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:

I shall try to show that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect. Second, I want to show that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.

Pitcher presents several points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein: Both authors are preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use of chess and chess pieces). Both make use of utterances that “sound like English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense. Both discuss giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity. Both repeatedly demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted. Both play with the boundary between quality and identity. Both show the incomprehensibility of private language and definitions. Both pose alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.

Now a forgotten psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England. In Alice and Wonderland, Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules of behavior and language. When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even though she is explicitly not invited. In response to Alice’s intrusion, the Hatter and Hare become combative. When Alice responds in turn by calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk? The passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.

“…I believe I can guess that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

This dialogue is short, but it is quite complex. Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then show how one stage leads to another. Each stage signifies a character’s turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party. The dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of substitution.

Alice guesses that she can guess “that”. Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself but to the answer to the riddle. We learn later that this answer does not exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing. Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we cannot hang him when he is not there (§462). Alice’s ‘that’ is used correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.

Substituting his own expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions. He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’. The March Hare does not say exactly what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s ‘that’ for the object it designates. Based on this change, the March Hare acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed expression. Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence, such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two expressions to work for the same meaning. Violating Alice’s perception, the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her expression, not an equivalent substitution.

This reveals something interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with others. We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections. We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words, seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution for Alice’s expression). Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression. Alice’s ‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy. This view supports Alice’s side, that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.

It is important to note for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the conversation. In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance. The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards generalization.

Now Alice becomes the one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech. Alice insists that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’. What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here? How does Alice use the word ‘same’ in this instance? When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’ and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions. She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”. Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this case. Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to be ‘the same’. Wittgenstein writes:

The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)

If we agree with Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually supportive when she equates the two expressions.

These two expressions do not always coincide. There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one fails to say what one means. There are also cases which we call lying, when one fails to mean what one says. Typically, but not always, it is up to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying. Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical right as a speaker to confirm.

The Mad Hatter disagrees with Alice, but he does not do several things. He does not argue against Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that ‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in Alice’s case or in any case. What does the Hatter attack? The Mad Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’. He does this by offering a counter example to this general form: ‘I see what I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’. This is generally true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly the set of things one sees and vice versa.

Alice started towards generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should do based on her particular case. Thus when Alice defends herself in her particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by the Hare. The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case. Because our expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms, it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.

The Hatter gives us an excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by generalizing with abstractions. He does not realize that he has failed to argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express ourselves adequately.

Regardless of this confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get what I like’. The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression. The Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’. The three of them are in agreement against the universal validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution. The three argue by presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘I y what I x’.

If we wanted to attack Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same. The Hatter does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples that include either meaning or saying. Instead, they provide disparate examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as ‘I y what I x’. The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted form for the situation of the case present at hand. We can ourselves witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.

The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice, but the Hatter violates this accord. He disrupts the agreement of the series by turning on the Dormouse. The Hatter here reverses his position against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case. Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and ‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice does. The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was open all the while.

The dialogue presents us with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the Dormouse). This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction found earlier. In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree with one’s opponent. In the course of an argument, one can find oneself getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases, but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups of cases by generalizing. The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction through the course of an argument.

Alice leaves the Tea Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with animals (flamingoes and groundhogs) as the game pieces (like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as games).

Cheshire cat shows up, causes a commotion. King and executioner get into an argument about whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded. This parallels the ‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body, effect without substance). The executioner argues that the cat can’t be beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that anything with a head can be beheaded.

The Duchess is now nice to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden. This is like the pig switch earlier. Alice is delighted, and decides that pepper made the Duchess angry. She begins to devise (too) simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet. The Duchess now approaches Alice and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).

Now, Alice attends the trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme setting up the scene). Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial, which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in the dream of Wonderland. Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None). Alice tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very important to the jury. Alice says it is not important at all, and the king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds best. Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant. Giant Alice finds all of this absurd. She declares that the evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.


Through the Looking Glass

In the beginning, Alice is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying to take milk from the white kitten. Alice says she should put the kitten out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be. Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and forgiving side. Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but they are sitting at her sides.

Alice passes through the mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into a dream). She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’ is most often a rock or a worm). They tell her about the Red Queen, who they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice. The Red Queen now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the RQ replies ‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).

Alice points to a hill, and RQ says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a valley’. Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how small, for this is nonsense. RQ replies, ‘I have heard nonsense compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.

RQ tells Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world. To get going, they both run, but end up not moving. RQ: here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place.

Much later, Alice meets the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind vs. world). She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t believe that. WQ says close your eyes and try very hard. Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things. WQ replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction, thus impossible ideals). The WQ turns into a sheep knitting with seven pairs of needles (sheep is wooly, knitting wool). They are now in a shop, and Alice is told to take something. She tries, but reaching for things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again). Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her hands.

Humpty Dumpty – Read pg 168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning? Many have noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument for the impossibility of a private language. Meaning is not simply what the individual wants it to be. Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right to tell her what she should have meant. There are two privileged positions in communication: sender and receiver. Which one has the true right to say what something meant? The answer seems to be that both have overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.

White Knight, stuff from whole book on horse, falls off on either side (reason, understanding). He invents things when he is upside down. Read his song.

Ethics: Sexism & Feminism

Introducing Prejudice (Sexism & Racism)

A friend of mine had a horrible experience last year when I was preparing this lecture on sexism and the next on racism for the first time. He was playing video games online, and one of the players asked if anybody was black in the most offensive way possible. My friend, who is black, said he did not know how to respond and simply said nothing in return. He said he was still not sure if he should have said something or not, and that this was the first OVERT racism he had experienced in the new millennium. He made a further observation that I have found quite valuable in describing racism and sexism in America today: While OVERT prejudice is often and in most places rare today, COVERT prejudice is constant and continuous. While slurs, mob violence and other open acts of racism are rare, we still live in a culture that is racially divided with institutions plagued by institutional racism. While women wear pants and are not openly called “doll” or “baby” so much anymore, the glass ceiling remains alive and well.

Just a little while ago, overt prejudice was the law of the land. Women were told openly, by teachers and scientists, that they were intellectually and socially inferior to men. I have an older co-worker who told me that when he was in elementary school in San Diego in the early 1950s, his class put on a production of Little Black Sambo, a British children’s story about a boy in India. He got the main part of Sambo which he performed in blackface, applied by his teacher. Because the British called Indians and Africans “blacks”, but this term is not applied to Indians in America, the children in the chorus were dressed up in overalls and mammy dresses and the teacher had them sing ‘Camp Town Races’ and other traditional black songs from the days of slavery even though Sambo is Indian and not ‘black’ or from the South.

It is a sign of progress that overt racism and sexism has become covert. This change has happened almost entirely in the last 50 years, since the 60s and the triumphs made by the civil rights and feminist movements. Unfortunately this change has convinced many, both right and left wing, that racism and sexism no longer exist in America. The media, which downplays America’s social problems (as we looked at with propaganda), ignores racism and sexism for the most part. Worst of all, the few times it pays attention to these problems is when they serve the interests of the dominant majority or powers that be. As my friend noted, if you point at covert racism as a marginalized person, YOU are called racist. We hear about white people losing opportunities to affirmative action policies, but not about racism against minority groups that cost them the same sorts of opportunities. Just after 9/11, feminists made brief appearances on news programs to tell us of the evils that traditional Islamic culture inflicts upon women, and then feminism disappeared again from our televisions.



I enjoy looking at the animal kingdom to see the root behaviors of our human problems. While the apes are our most direct ancestors, the octopus is studied by researchers as one of our most important and ancient ancestors because it has a brain very much like our brain stem, the most basic and early part of our brains. Thus, studying octopi allows us to study the most basic behaviors of animals and ourselves. In one study, researchers took an octopus and shocked it whenever they showed it a teddy bear. Quite understandably, the octopus soon became very scared of the bear, but the experiment did not stop there. They took a second octopus, put it in a separate tank next to the other traumatized octopus so the two could not communicate other than by sight. They then showed the teddy bear to the first octopus, and let the second octopus watch the first be frightened. They then took away the first octopus and showed the second the teddy bear. Surprisingly, the second octopus was even more frightened of the teddy bear than the first. The researchers concluded that octopi can watch each other, as all animals with brains can, and learn about what they should like or fear from the behaviors of others. They also concluded, important for considering prejudice, that the second octopus was more scared than the first because it knew it should be scared of the teddy bear but did not know why it should be scared.

Consider that covert and institutional prejudice are learned reactions and fears, and they need never be consciously or overtly expressed or explained by those who teach or learn these reactions. In this sense, covert prejudice can be more severe and harder to unlearn because it is never consciously or overtly expressed and so there is no opportunity for direct criticism.

A good (or rather horrible) example of covert racism is covered in a famous article The Myth of Model Minority. The article was written in the 90s by Rosalind Chou, then an Asian-American college student who was upset by many articles in Time and Newsweek that warned of rising Asian-American voices as a new “special-interest” group. These articles seemed to speak with the voice of the “average” American, in the name of “the common interest”, a voice that feared Asian voices becoming like African and Latino voices of dissent. Apparently, the “common interest” is threatened by minority groups who have “special interests” that can pull in the opposite direction, and warns that while Asians have been quiet and supportive of the common interest in the past there are signs that they are becoming dissenting opinions like the voices of Africans and Latinos. Chou notes that Time, Newsweek and the mainstream media often speak with such a voice, a voice which does not identify itself as particular or white at all but is speaking in opposition to all other interests. Why are Asian and African and Latino American interests not “our” common interests? This is one of the dominant ways that covert racism remains a constant and very real experience for many Americans.

Today, we cover sexism and the reactions of feminists to the oppression of women. Just like for Asian Americans, feminists are not “us” in the media but a special interest group that opposes the common interest.


Myths and Realities of Gender Differences

The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Grossman already has told us that there is no difference between men and women in combat physically or psychologically. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet (Melody’s lesbian serial rapist story, female gang members story, female serial murderers as poisoning, girls style of picking on people vs. boys). Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. Consider that it has been said women have a emotional-sexual cycle that lasts 28 days, men’s lasts 6 minutes.

What, then, are the differences between men and women?
Most obviously, there are physiological differences that relate to sex and procreation. In addition, there are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men.

First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. The two best examples are 1) classic women ‘let’s talk’ vs. men ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ that becomes strained in many heterosexual relationships (choosing a restaurant, where women wants to discuss and man wants her to just pick), and 2) male boss ‘don’t bring it to me until it’s done and done right’ vs. female boss ‘let’s go over the details so we are on the same page’ difference of support offered.

Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. Women want to be desired, whereas men want to get what they desire. BOTH OF THESE differences are relative and to a degree, a leaning apart as I like to say. Thus, men like being watched and desired, and women don’t want to talk about everything.

Other than these RELATIVE oppositions, there is no good evidence to suggest that men and women are very much different at all. The work of Piaget suggests that men and women undergo the same mental development in the same set of stages at roughly the same ages.


History of Sexism and Feminism

In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. Women were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase.

Why did this happen? The best explanation so far, one that does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the community. When people lived in small communities, women could raise children at the center of the village, as the political center. As city states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise one’s children at the public center. Thus, women retreated into the home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who could venture out of the home and into the centers of political activity. Today, devices allow women to raise children while fully participating in public life, but women are still confined in a way to the home in balancing life between home and career.

When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam (the three largest cultures yet) all had to offer women better status and rights than they had previously (Naga princess story of Buddhism, stories of Jesus involving women and men cheating equally bad, Islamic law and divorce and consensual sex), but all three oppressed women (nuns can only teach kids).

Modern society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning property persists. A united Nations 2004 report claims that women work 20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8 ¾ hours). Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
(Performance art piece with empty area of museum with card that says women who clean are the artists who have performed in this space).

Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too” (Kate Weber from high school assembly asks crowd ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?’ most everyone raised hands, ‘Then you are all feminists!’, impressed me much). It is a shame that people, men but ALSO women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of feminism which said that “militant feminists” “hate men”.

There are three waves, each building on the last and addressing new issues from the last wave.

The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain.
The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony. She argued that the abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their husbands (note Mohammed in the Ahadith says this in 600 CE, with problems today).
The first wave, not of course known as that till the second wave, ended in 1919 with 19th amendment to the constitution.

The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, took off in early 60s and culminated in the civil rights act of 1966 (backed by both NOW and NAACP, the biggest US anti-sexism and racism groups together). While the first wave said ‘this is America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupt institution that needed to be changed.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel).
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The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family (valium in the 50s, TV’s Madmen).

The major criticism of the movement, which only fully rose in the third wave:
Gloria Jean Watkins, known as ‘bell hooks’, early critic of 2nd wave as white middle class women empowerment that ignores all else in the name of ‘feminism’, thus hooks’ ‘womanism’.

The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal.

The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? I was talking with a co-worker the other day, and she said her son and his friends in high school think that feminists are hippie women who don’t shave their arm pits, hate men and think that the oppression of women is a thing of the past. Notice that this deals with these two issues: the kids misunderstand feminists as both anti-sex and not recognizing the battle is over.

First Issue: Structuralism of 50s & 60s vs. Post-Structuralism after 60s. De Beauvoir says that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’. Judith Butler (I saw speak on Wed) says that gender identity is performative. Both of these figures thus back the poststructuralist conception, that identity is created and performed.

Second Issue: If a woman puts on makeup and wears a short skirt, is she being oppressed or is she actively expressing her individual sexuality? Second wave came under fire from the third wave because feminists often told women that if they tried to be sexy they were being deceived and made into property (vs. my friend from Berkeley at the Lusty Lady, working for prostitute’s rights here and in the third world). This drew a fight between anti-pornography and prostitution feminists and younger pro-sex feminism. Pro-sex feminists ask, even if we are talking of abusive male style porn (vs. porn FOR lesbians), do you want to make porn illegal? Should we try to deny men watching women and lust, or should we empower the individual woman to live as freely and equally as men in a complex and messy world?

This is still a big issue, as many feminist authors have argued that TV and movies today SEEM to be pro-feminist (Sex and the City, Ali McBeal, Brigit Jones’ Diary) but in fact they are stories where a working white woman (and her friends) try to find the perfect man to find happiness.

Grrrl punk movement of the 90s, lead group Bikini Kill as third wave branch.

Intro Philosophy: Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America.

In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.

Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.


The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.

The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.

Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.

He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.

He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.

Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.

When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.

Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.

While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.

In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.

In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.

In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.

In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.


THE TRACTATUS

In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.

If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.

Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.


THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.

At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.

In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that, like the positivists, he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.

Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation of Freud for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.

Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially ashy or wet because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work.

In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud had tried to boil human relations and the mind down to sex or he himself had tried to boil logic down to its necessary truths.

The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to describing and re-describing things. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possibly description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things.

One favorite way to approach this today is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models, are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight.


THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

In this monumental work, one of my favorites, Wittgenstein is arguing for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the objectivist position of positivism and the subjectivist position of skepticism. He argues against scientific positivism/realism (facts are in the world), and also psychological skepticism (meaning is in the head). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against each quote in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act.

In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either in the head or (exclusively) in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place.

Games and rules gather people together, but also individuals can always variously interpret rules and meanings. Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Lao Zi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.

Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy.

7- Language games (actions and language are interwoven as forms of life)
11- Language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity
12- cabin in a locomotive, with crank wheel, pump, switch and brake
15- Naming is like attaching a label, and just this (hello my name is sticker).
17- Classification always is with purpose/point of view, like chessmen classes.
18- Language is like an old city, with side streets and squares (vs. logic matrix of Tractatus)
22- vs. Frege’s inner assumption of a sentence is rather the sentence in its place.
57-58- Red exists, yes, but not just in my head or in the world, but in my seeing, using and talking about red here and there with others, not apart from this.
65- no essence other than the family resemblance association.
66- use ‘games’ as example of family, a complicated network.
67- vs. Confucius, not one thread within (compassion as essence) but rather the twist of the chord is itself the only consistent thread that runs all the way through.
69- When we do draw rigid boundaries, it has a use and purpose in a game/culture we share with others. We do not draw boundaries because ‘that is what there is’, nor ‘simply how I see it’.
Read 80- example of disappearing chair
Read 83- Rules to aimless ball game of catch, but unwritten (who do you throw it to?)
Read 84- We don’t need to stop up all the cracks to live games.
85- a rule is like a signpost, not a guarantee in stone.
89- it seemed like the essence lay within the thing, waiting, but in fact we want to interconnect the thing with many other things, expanding it, getting more of its interrelations and possibilities interacting with other things.
90- It is investigating the possibilities of X, not penetrating X. Analysis is comparison and substitution, not getting to secret core. 91- Lang misleads.
99- Trying for definite sense other than sentence is like ‘locking’ man in room with the window open. We want a ‘must’, but too many openings to plug all (HD and Alice).
106- It would be like repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.
107- A Tractatus logic would be slippery ice, no friction, like ‘being’. Back to rough ground!
108- Need to remove crystalline by reversing investigation (Foucault and capillary)
109- do away with explanation, description takes its place (all we really were doing).
IN FACT, this means that our explanations are descriptions, sketches, not anchors or bedrock.
118- There is no need for final definitions or explanations, and saying this is not a nihilism that can mean nothing but rather CLEARING GROUND for meaning.
133- the real discovery is that we can start and stop philosophizing when we want to
478- fearing hand in flame, 1000 voices/reasons drown each other out together
498- towards nonsense and humor, like philosophy, showing us forms of life.
499- Calling something ‘nonsense’ or ‘no sense’ or ‘crazy’ is setting up a fence for a purpose, in a game/culture with others. It is not just that there is no meaning there.
500- ‘Senseless’ is like withdrawn from circulation (of library)
513- Consider, no sense unless trying to fit on a rollercoaster or something, a context could give it sense, but it sounds funny at first to everyone.
514-515- Rose in the Dark (Dada and Surrealism)
Book II- ‘Jastrow’ (Wittgenstein’s) Duck Rabbit, more towards art next time.

Logic: Late Wittgenstein & The Philosophical Investigations

Last time we talked about Wittgenstein’s early thought, the Tractatus, and proving axioms with Wittgenstein’s truth table method. Now we will look at how Wittgenstein’s thought changed in his later notebooks, the most famous being the Philosophical Investigations.

Because Wittgenstein went from believing logic is an airtight system in his early period to believing logic is a messy incomplete set of games in his later period, it is also the perfect time to study common fallacies or errors in human reasoning. These fallacies arise from using the moves of logic in a complex and imperfect world.

First we will consider how Wittgenstein’s thought changed since he formulated the truth table method in the Tractatus. Second we will read passages of the Philosophical Investigations. Third, we will consider the common set of fallacies and how they stem from logic itself.


THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.

At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.

In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that, like the positivists, he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses. Thus, there is no more a single necessary meaning of ‘and’ or ‘true’ in the head than there is a single correct scientific description or picture of the world. He came to argue that ‘and’ and ‘or’ are not exclusively in the head, but real things involved in the irreducibly complex games we play in the world.

Consider how we have seen that the IF>THEN operation in logic is capable of working in many different ways, and the truth table method chooses a regular way for it to work. Consider that OR can be inclusive or exclusive, and the truth table method chooses to use OR inclusively. Consider that AND can be used like OR as a general inclusion of several things, but we may agree that the AND is true even if every last thing is not present. Wittgenstein came to argue that any system of logic, like his truth tables, is a tool that is a thing in the world like any other. Because logic is a tool, it does not need to be perfectly defined or entirely consistent any more than an apple needs to be perfectly defined or entirely consistent.

There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.

Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation of Freud for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.

Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially ashy or wet because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work.

In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud had tried to boil human relations and the mind down to sex or he himself had tried to boil logic down to its necessary truths.

The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to describing and re-describing things. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possibly description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things.

One favorite way to approach this today is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models, are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight.


THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

In this monumental work, one of my favorites, Wittgenstein is arguing for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the objectivist position of positivism and the subjectivist position of skepticism. He argues against scientific positivism/realism (facts are in the world), and also psychological skepticism (meaning is in the head). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against each quote in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act.

In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either in the head or (exclusively) in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place.

Games and rules gather people together, but also individuals can always variously interpret rules and meanings. Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Lao Zi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.

Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy.

7- Language games (actions and language are interwoven as forms of life)
11- Language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity
12- cabin in a locomotive, with crank wheel, pump, switch and brake
15- Naming is like attaching a label, and just this (hello my name is sticker).
17- Classification always is with purpose/point of view, like chessmen classes.
18- Language is like an old city, with side streets and squares (vs. logic matrix of Tractatus)
22- vs. Frege’s inner assumption of a sentence is rather the sentence in its place.
57-58- Red exists, yes, but not just in my head or in the world, but in my seeing, using and talking about red here and there with others, not apart from this.
65- no essence other than the family resemblance association.
66- use ‘games’ as example of family, a complicated network.
67- vs. Confucius, not one thread within (compassion as essence) but rather the twist of the chord is itself the only consistent thread that runs all the way through.
69- When we do draw rigid boundaries, it has a use and purpose in a game/culture we share with others. We do not draw boundaries because ‘that is what there is’, nor ‘simply how I see it’.
Read 80- example of disappearing chair
Read 83- Rules to aimless ball game of catch, but unwritten (who do you throw it to?)
Read 84- We don’t need to stop up all the cracks to live games.
85- a rule is like a signpost, not a guarantee in stone.
89- it seemed like the essence lay within the thing, waiting, but in fact we want to interconnect the thing with many other things, expanding it, getting more of its interrelations and possibilities interacting with other things.
90- It is investigating the possibilities of X, not penetrating X. Analysis is comparison and substitution, not getting to secret core. 91- Lang misleads.
99- Trying for definite sense other than sentence is like ‘locking’ man in room with the window open. We want a ‘must’, but too many openings to plug all (HD and Alice).
106- It would be like repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.
107- A Tractatus logic would be slippery ice, no friction, like ‘being’. Back to rough ground!
108- Need to remove crystalline by reversing investigation (Foucault and capillary)
109- do away with explanation, description takes its place (all we really were doing).
IN FACT, this means that our explanations are descriptions, sketches, not anchors or bedrock.
118- There is no need for final definitions or explanations, and saying this is not a nihilism that can mean nothing but rather CLEARING GROUND for meaning.
133- the real discovery is that we can start and stop philosophizing when we want to
478- fearing hand in flame, 1000 voices/reasons drown each other out together
498- towards nonsense and humor, like philosophy, showing us forms of life.
499- Calling something ‘nonsense’ or ‘no sense’ or ‘crazy’ is setting up a fence for a purpose, in a game/culture with others. It is not just that there is no meaning there.
500- ‘Senseless’ is like withdrawn from circulation (of library)
513- Consider, no sense unless trying to fit on a rollercoaster or something, a context could give it sense, but it sounds funny at first to everyone.
514-515- Rose in the Dark (Dada and Surrealism)
Book II- ‘Jastrow’ (Wittgenstein’s) Duck Rabbit

Ethics: Social Class & Karp

Power dynamics exist in earliest societies between the ruler(s) and the common people. Hierarchies exist in ape societies and the earliest human societies. We saw the divide in Grossman of the officers from the soldiers, of those who make the call and those who carry out the orders. We have seen how in the Egyptian wisdom the earliest societies created systems of class and ability as they gathered cultures and technologies and developed them.

Class is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’. This was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us. We amplified our accusation of them in our media (including both news and fiction), and muffled anything that could help their accusation of us. The same messages go on today with Islam and China. In truth, class and power have been a very familiar problem since we were apes. Power and authority are a two edged sword. On the one hand, one wants leaders and followers to organize and coordinate human society. On the other hand, one also wants equality and sympathy which power tends to distort and ignore.

America is caught in this bind still today (as is all of humanity). According to some statistics, the powerful today own more than ever before in history, both in amount and in percentage, in spite of the equal and opposite truth that the middle class and class mobility are also larger today than ever before. With modernity and life saturated with devices, humans are more enabled than ever before. This means that the common people are more enabled than ever before AND the gap between common people and the powerful is greater than ever before, which is counter-intuitive. Consider that in the year 1000 in Europe, the average nobleman owned one horse, one sword and shield, and often could not write their own name. The gap today between rich and poor is far greater than the gap between the toiling serf and the noble lord of the middle ages. This is very similar to Grossman remarking that Alexander only lost 700 soldiers in his entire quest for empire in 300 BCE, an absurdly low body count for a modern conflict.

What is Class?
Class is any division of people into recognizable groups. If any group is recognizable to themselves and other groups, this is enough to claim the group is a self-conscious social class. When talking about social class, we often concentrate on the differences of power and ability that people have in a society. There are two types of class status, ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time). The common indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe), family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture (religion, language). The common indicators of achieved class status are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor, success, celebrity).

There is plenty of evidence that apes know the difference between a privileged position on top and a marginalized position on the bottom. In Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In the Flesh, Lakoff (a Berkeley professor of ability and fame) says that the human mind is ‘hardwired’ to think up as powerful and down and weakness. Thus we can draw a simple chart of upper and lower class. While the extremes have always been there, as society has developed we have developed and complexified the arrangement. The growth of the middle class is an age old process, but with modernity and devices the middle classes have become quite complicated.

On top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it they do not need to work. On the bottom are those who have so little that if they do not work then they have nothing at all. In the middle are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain property.
The middle thus includes everyone from field workers and janitors to doctors and attorneys.

In ancient societies, often the leaders were from privileged families that had it made in the shade owning everything, and beneath them would be warriors, merchants, artists, farmers and workers. What we have seen over time through the common history of cultures is that as the devices increased different groups gained power and could raise their status. This leads all the way to the complex middle class of today. We saw in ancient Egypt how the classes of scribes flourished, and specialized classes of scribes leads us to academia today. Both Mahavira of Jainism and the Buddha both came from the warrior 2nd caste in India between 800 and 500, which scholars have said indicates that the second class was making power grabs from the highest priest Brahman class at this time. Consider that artists were not rich or famous among the population until modern art made the painter a celebrity.

The complex of the middle class today shows us many types of people who have condensed cultures and strategies for maintaining their position and authority. Consider that a doctor’s opinion is worth something to the patient or the toothpaste company advertising agent, but the doctor has to be backed by the state. Doctors have great power, and thus the ability to acquire greater status individually through money, ability, fame, marrying into the right family, but the doctor who has to earn money is still not upper class. A true upper class member does either management or no work at all and simply owns property. A doctor who sees patients is thus upper middle class, or professional class.

The one to bring all of this out into public discussion was Karl Marx, who we already heard from in objection to utilitarianism (though Marx could be called a utilitarian himself). Marx was disillusioned by the German failed revolutions of 1849. Moving to England, Marx saw the growing classes of factory workers and others in harsh conditions, and began writing books. The French Revolution had shown everyone that the leaders can be removed (the French noble families). Marx was convinced that just as the French had removed the noble families, there was a new upper class that was settling into modernity that would have to be removed. The old upper class in all societies were the noble families. Now, just as warriors had risen up against the Brahmins in the time of Buddha, the merchants and traders had come in modernity to raise themselves with wealth to be equal to or even above the nobles. This means that modernity has seen wealth rise to trump family as the biggest class indicator. This is not to say that family or ethnicity no longer matter (consider the Walton family who founded Wal-Mart, three of whom are in the top 10 wealthiest individuals in the world), but now an owner of a wealthy company is as upper class as one can get in America. This is in part due to American culture which ditched the British nobility system in its breaking off from the Empire.

In America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top 1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class (over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000). This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times what the lowest middle class members earn.

How in America is such power and privilege maintained? Don’t we have a democracy in which everyone can be heard? Didn’t we ditch the British nobility? How is it that the rich and powerful seem to be able to do whatever they want without much attention, but when the common people need schools or medical coverage there is always too much resistance?

In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality, Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in America. All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to the top 20%. Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line (to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast). Our infant mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival rates in Malaysia and India.

In the second article, Media Magic, Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class disappear from America. In propaganda week, we talked about the messages that the Soviets and US sent back and forth. In American media, not only are black people as tokens doing just great (often as cops and soldiers), but no one is starving or living in their car with their family, picket fenced houses have plenty to eat and a large shopping budget, and class difference rarely makes a difference. In the 80s there were many evil rich guy villains, but the fantastic plot always thwarts the evil guy with too much money and a moustache (great example is Goonies, where the families were going to loose their houses to a golf course run by evil rich father and son, up to the father’s final line ‘No one will ever loose their house again!’ while throwing pirate treasure up into the air).

Poverty is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in 500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set the nations news). Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print. Visually, they are never given a face with photographs or clips (a particularly important factor – tell people to go look up the whistle tips clip, compare the tipsters to the middle class white woman complaining ‘I have to get up for work’). Whenever the poor are covered, it is ALWAYS from a middle class white perspective, never from the perspective of the poor. This is lined up next to Democrats unabashedly supporting the middle class but never the poor with words and programs. Obama as other Democrats support “middle class families”, and no one mentions needed programs to help the impoverished get out of poverty. They have to speak as if there IS no poverty, that America’s way of life does not have harmful and increasing side effects.

It is estimated that 2/3rds of the Senate is composed of millionaires. This is quite disproportionate to the population. The media never point this out or indicate it is a problem.

Walter Karp’s Indispensable Enemies
Walter Karp (1934-1989) was a writer and journalist largely for Harper’s magazine. His favorite subjects are the crooked nature of America getting into wars, which he argues are power grabs for the upper class, and the shallow and deceptive two party system of American politics, the subject of Indispensable Enemies, which he argued is a device to keep power in the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the common people.

Some great quotes (from Wikipedia):
“The left and right wings of the party establishment- two claws of an ancient bird of prey.”
“The public school system…a 12 year sentence of mind control…destroying the exerxise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.”
“The most esteemed journalists are the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.”
And, my favorite: America has one party with two wings.
(Note similarity to spectrum within one communist party system, left and right leaning)

In Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for itself. Karp gives as example country and city folk (farms vs. roads and schools), where both seem to stop the other from getting what they want but neither can get what they want. Karp will spend much of the book examining the two party system in this light.

Karp argues that we are being given the run-around. We are being told that this is the unfortunate bi-product of living in a diverse land of freedom, but the powerful get what they want and the powerless are being told that they get nothing because they and the other groups of powerless are free and opposed to each other. We live in the most powerful nation thus far in history, but we can’t get anything done for the common people and are told this is BECAUSE of the common people and how free they are to oppose one another in their opinions. Karp says: this does nothing to explain how the things that get done do get done, and how they do benefit particular (and powerful) interests.

Karp argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win elections needs to be questioned. We need to rather ask what the two parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has risen to be the wealthiest nation). When you look at it this way, we see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down the middle since the civil war polarized the country. A landslide in American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting popular legislation. Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they ever change at all. This means that, through all of the changes that Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same.

Karp argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things. This is the thesis of the book. We can see that anyone too left or right of center is sabotaged by the party. A party would rather see the other side win a district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward real change. You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and get elected. If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the 50%, not on pushing forward a program. Thus Karp charges that we have one party, with two wings, not two parties at all.

Remember that Karp started writing as a college student during the Vietnam War. He saw how the Democrats weakly criticized the way the war was run but helped kill the peace movement by “keeping the war out of politics”. This is what we have seen since Karp’s death in the middle east conflicts. We can say in light of the Corporation that both parties also keep corporations and their ability to pay both sides to play ‘out of politics’.

In addition, both parties collude to keep third parties out. If either gets significantly over 60% of the vote, one party could break into two. It serves the simple interests of both to keep just about 50%. That way, both can bank half the population without fear of a third party taking part, and the two can drive the people against each other with empty ideology and there is no competition either for the liberal or conservative establishment such that they would have to do something.

In political science classes, you can learn that most Americans do not vote because they do not believe that they can get anything done. Karp is arguing that the parties are in fact trying for this, to involve one with a polarized party such that one votes merely for right or left and nothing else concrete. You also learn that most powerful corporations and figures straddle both sides of American politics, contributing to both Democrat and Republican campaigns. This is the way that the device works. The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the interests of American power (which is held in particular American hands). The common people are set against each other and told that because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done. The parties are not in fact trying to please the public at all, but merely polarize liberals against conservatives while getting next to nothing done any direction for the common people. The parties want your allegiance but no enthusiasm or interest. The decisions that are real, that affect power dynamics and class relations, are to be made by the powerful and not put into the awareness of the people at large. This is how the powerful maintain their ability and the common people are kept from doing anything meaningful or lasting. For example, if a war is on the table, all of congress votes for it and then the Democrats start hemming and hawing to the public about how this war could be better managed. What Karp describes of the Vietnam war, we see again post September 11th. Obama shifts the war back to Afghanistan, yet does not say the war should never have happened. BUT: conservatives can not lobby congress to get complete freedom for gun ownership for the common people.

Karp argues that the real issues that deal with power in America are never put on the ballot. Consider gun ownership and gay marriage. These two issues will likely be kicked back and forth between liberals and conservatives without much concession. No matter which way either goes, opposite pressure can be mounted easily, and the upper class is not effected in the slightest. However, whether medical coverage should be free rather than owned by powerful people is an issue that changes class relations, and thus it is not a decision that should be given to the common people. It is clear that both liberals and conservatives would vote for free medical coverage even with conservative spin against government spending. Karp argues this is the reason you do not see anything like this on the ballot.
In other words, it is all a game of good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margarine.