“Belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science.”
—Bruno Latour, “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame” or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate
January 2013
7 posts
“So how does anything as mundane as ritual give rise to anything as exalted as enlightenment? The prejudice contained in this question still haunts our ability to understand the powers of ritual practice in Zen or in any other religious tradition. Reducing ritual to mechanistic habit, we fail to understand how a practice of ritual can bring about a disciplined transformation of the practitioner, in this case how Zen ritual can give rise to Zen mind. The key, of course, is the gradual, even imperceptible, scripting of character through mental and physical exercise. In the Zen tradition, ritual is a thoroughgoing disciplinary program, imposed at first upon the practitioner until such time as the discipline is internalized as a self-disciplinary, self-conscious formation of mind and character.”
—Dale Wright, Zen Ritual p11
“There is nothing extravagant, spiritual, or mysterious in beginning to describe religious talk in this way. We are used to other, perfectly mundane forms of speech that are evaluated not by their correspondence with any state of affairs either, but by the quality of the interaction they generate from the way they are uttered. This experience—and experience is what we wish to share—is common in the domain of “love-talk” and, more largely, personal relations. “Do you love me?” is not assessed by the originality of the sentence—none are more banal, trivial, boring, rehashed—but rather by the transformation it manifests in the listener, as well as in the speaker. Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another. When the latter is uttered, something happens. A slight displacement in the normal pace of things. A tiny shift in the passage of time. You have to decide, to get involved: maybe to commit yourselves irreversibly. We are not only undergoing an experience among others, but a change in the pulse and tempo of experience: kairos is the word the Greeks would have used to designate this new sense of urgency.”
—Bruno Latour, “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame” or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate
The mereological fallacy →
andersonbrownphilosophy.blogspot.co.uk
“This original Cartesian error continues to infest contemporary cognitive science. When the brain areas in the left hemisphere correlated with understanding speech light up and one says, “This is where speech comprehension is occurring,” the mereological fallacy is alive and well. Speech comprehension is not something that occurs inside the body. Persons comprehend speech, and they do it out in the “external” world (the only world there is). Positing representations that exist inside the body is an instance of the mereological fallacy, and it is so necessarily, by virtue of the communicative element that is part of the definition of “representation,” “symbol” etc. Neither any part of the brain nor the brain or nervous system considered as a whole interprets anything. The key to a natural semantic of intentional predicates is the realization that they are predicated of persons, whole embodied beings functioning in relation to a larger environment.”
“For more than 200 years now the doctrine has been increasingly held that there is such a thing as mental illness, that it is a sickness like any other, and that those who suffer from it should be dealt with medically: they should be treated by doctors, if necessary in a hospital, and not blamed for what has befallen them. This belief has its social uses. Were there no such notion we would probably have to invent it.”
—Erving Goffman, “The Insanity of Place”
“Metaphysical questions are indeed misleading, for they express an unclarity about the grammar of words (e.g. of the use of ‘I’, ‘mind’, ‘space’ and ‘time’) in the form of a scientific question. Unsurprisingly, the typical metaphysical answer appears to specify a putative truth about the world. The only gold one can extract from such ore is in the form of rules for the use of words. But most of metaphysics is dross, to be discarded as nonsense. Wittgenstein’s account made it clear, as most previous critics of metaphysics had not, why metaphysical assertions — that is, assertions about the world which seem to be necessarily true — are so compelling, and what modest grammatical truths lurk behind them.”
—Peter Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, p118
“One of the greatest impediments for philosophy is the expectation of new, deep revelations. For the human craving for the arcane is present in philosophy no less than in other walks of life, manifesting itself in the desire for hitherto undreamt-of mysteries about the mind, thought and language. But in philosophy there are no mysteries, only the mesmerizing confusions engendered inter alia by our entanglement in grammar. Here too, as in psychoanalysis, there is often an underlying tacit motive for cleaving to error and illusion. Hence, ‘if you find yourself stumped trying to convince someone of something and not getting anywhere, tell yourself that it is the will and not the intellect that you’re up against’ (MS 158, 35).”
—Peter Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, p112
December 2012
5 posts
“The Benedictine Rule had called for manual labor, as well as prayer and reading, and it was always assumed that this labor could include writing. The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves. The task was therefore inherently humiliating as well as tedious, a perfect combination for the ascetic project of disciplining the spirit.”
—Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
“When particular ‘things’ are necessary elements of certain practices, then, contrary to a classical sociological argument, subject–subject relations cannot claim any priority over subject–object relations, as far as the production and reproductions of social order(liness) is concerned. The stable relation between agents (body/minds) and things within certain practices reproduces the social, as does the ‘mutually’ stable relation between several agents in other practices. Moreover, one can assume that most social practices consist of routinized relations between several agents (body/minds) and objects. At any rate, the social is also to be located in practices in which single agents deal with objects … and in this sense also the objects – television sets, houses and brownies – are the place of the social insofar as they are necessary components of social practices.”
—Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices” p253
“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.”
—George Santayana, Soliliquies in England
November 2012
10 posts
“Individualist ideas developed in the thought and sensibility, particularly of educated Europeans, during the seventeenth century. These seem to have facilitated the growth of new political forms that challenged the ancient hierarchies, and of new modes of economic life, which gave a greater place to the market and to entrepreneurial enterprise. But once these new forms are in place, and people are brought up in them, then this individualism is greatly strengthened, because it is rooted in their everyday practice, in the way they make their living and the way they relate to others in political life. It comes to seem the only conceivable outlook, which it certainly wasn’t for their ancestors who pioneered it.”
—Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity p20
“The world of thought is generally regarded as a vast territory. So it is; but it may not be so fantastic as it is touted to be. We have a prejudice that thought is free, untrammeled, infinitely open, unapproachable from the outside. And yet—if thought is an internalization of rituals from social life, further developed by decomposition and recombination of its symbolic elements, in the train of impulses to externalize them again—how strange can it be?”
—Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains p220
“Inner lives have varying degrees of privacy. But the forms that privacy takes are not necessarily unique. The devices that we use to entrain our thoughts, to get ourselves together, may be largely imported from standard models available in external social life. Verbal incantations—traditionally, in the form of prayers or magic; contemporarily in the form of pep talks or curses—are just some of the devices with which external rituals are taken into the self. No doubt there are other such inner rituals to be discovered.”
—Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains p220
“It is precisely the complex interrelationship between human beings and their environment that makes it necessary to reduce the scale; only in this way can we avoid the temptation to simplify the relations among people, phenomena and events. Thus we can continue in our research to assume a structure to society, but must take pains to treat it like any other social phenomenon, constantly changing and indeterminable, while also, above all, insulating it from any links to predetermined conclusions imposed by the metanarratives.”
—Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon,”The Singularization of History” p722
“There exists no society to begin with, no reservoir of ties, no big reassuring pot of glue to keep all those groups together. If you don’t have the festival now or print the newspaper today, you simply lose the grouping, which is not a building in need of restoration but a movement in need of continuation. If a dancer stops dancing, the dance is finished.”
—Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, p37
“Macrostructure consists of nothing more than large numbers of microencounters, repeated (or sometimes changing) over time and across space. This gives us exactly the dimensions of macrostructures: the sheer numbers of persons and encounters involved; the amount of time taken up by encounters of various kinds and their repetitions; and the configuration they make in physical space. Time, space, and number: These are the only macrovariables, and every other macro-terminology is metaphorical, and ultimately should be translated into these. Everything else in a theory is microprocesses. Moreover, it is at the micro level that the dynamics of any theory must be located. The structures never do anything; it is only persons in real situations who act.”
—Randall Collins, “Interaction Ritual Chains, Power and Property” p195
“In MS 124, where, as we have seen, [Robinson] Crusoe is discussed at some length, Wittgenstein introduces the idea of a language that is not a means of communication, but rather a ‘toolbox’ for a person’s private use. This, he writes, is perfectly conceivable – as is patent in the case of a Crusoe. For the meanings of the words in this private language are manifest in Crusoe’s behaviour (MS 124, 221f.). But, Wittgenstein continues, can one not conceive of a language in which someone speaks or writes of his own private sensations, his inner experiences, for his own use? Such a language would, of course, be intelligible only to him, for no one else could know what the words of his language refer to (MS 124, 222). This sets the stage for the private language arguments proper, which are designed to show that although it may seem as if we were here dealing with a language – that is an illusion. It is an illusion to which most philosophers of the modern era succumbed, for they thought that our public languages are the confluence of all speakers’ private languages, the words of which signify (name) private ideas or mental representations.”
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GP Baker and PMS Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity p166
- A great, concise clarification of what Wittgenstein meant by a private language - so often misunderstood - only recently I read a paper in which somebody thought he was demolishing Wittgenstein by pointing out that a Robinson Crusoe type could develop his own language.
“Wittgenstein shows not just that all language is vague, but that we should not deplore this fact. Vagueness is not necessarily a defect of language… No improvement is made by adding something to a signpost that removes a possible misunderstanding that nobody has. The adequacy of explanation is to be judged by everyday practical standards, not by some arcane theoretical ones. It is absence of agreement in a practice that is a defect of language, not the mere possibility that there might be irresolvable disagreements which never in fact arise. Wittgenstein seems to push the bidding even higher: that vagueness is impossible to eliminate even in principle and is indispensible to the efficient use of language for communication.”
—GP Baker and PMS Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Understanding pp215-16
