Time Stands Still

The traffic on the city's congested streets came entirely to a halt. All the clocks stood still, registering 11:49 exactly. Had time ceased? Had movement frozen? People got out of their vehicles, which immediately dissolved into the air, leaving the people as a mass on the streets in their hundreds of thousands. Charles moved through the crowds calling out encouraging chants:
We have all the time in the world!
We have time on our side!
We have time on our hands!
We have time in our hands!
The at first hesitant chanting became a deafening, joyous uproar.
Time had stopped, but movement and life hadn't.

Life according to ELDRED

Every     Living     Deadshit Deadhead Deadbeat Dunce Dullard Dummy Drongo Dolt Dude or            
 Dandy     Reads     European     Directives
”    ”    ”    Requires     Enlightened     Discipline
”    ”    ”    Rejects     Extravagant     Downplay
”    ”    ”    Regrets     Evasive     Decisions
”    ”    ”    Resents     Elongated     Dildoes
”    ”    ”    Resends     Extradition     Demands
”    ”    ”    Returns     Exculpatory     Documents
”    ”    ”    Rifles     Endearing     Diaries
”    ”    ”    Rummages     Extensive     Dossiers
”    ”    ”    Remains     Evermore     Devoted
”    ”    ”    Re-enacts     Enlightenment     Dramas
”    ”    ”    Rescues     Elusive     Damsels
”    ”    ”    Rescinds     Established     Dogma
”    ”    ”    Radiates     Erudite     Discontent
”    ”    ”    Reorganizes     Eclectic     Dancesteps
”    ”    ”    Renovates     Excavated     Dunnies
”    ”    ”    Rides     Expatiating     Dillies
”    ”    ”    Reiterates     Expiatory     Discourse
”    ”    ”    Regurgitates     Ethereal     Dilemmas
”    ”    ”    Ramifies     Extant     Developments
”    ”    ”    Radicalizes     Empathetic     Drives
”    ”    ”    Reforms     Existential     Drudgery
”    ”    ”    Rips     Escapist     Drapery
”    ”    ”    Rolls     Emotive     Dice
”    ”    ”    Rubs     Expensive     Dolls
”    ”    ”    Runs     Erratic     Diatribes
”    ”    ”    Raps     Esoteric     Ditties
”    ”    ”    Relishes     Erotic     Daydreams
”    ”    ”    Reduces     Excessive     Diets
”    ”    ”    Remixes     Ephemeral     Dainties
”    ”    ”    Revives    Extinct     Dodos
”    ”    ”    Rehabilitates    Excoriated     Dramatists
”    ”    ”    Records     Expiring     Doldrums
”    ”    ”    Relegates     Elaborate     Designs
”    ”    ”    Recites     Exhortatory     Dithyrambs
”    ”    ”    Reviles     Eruptive     Doggerel
”    ”    ”    Represses     Effusive     Drivel
and     anything     else     you     can     imagine.

Adam Smith on "In a nation distracted by faction..."

"In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. All such people are held in contempt and derision, frequently in detestation, by the furious zealots of both parties. A true party-man hates and despises candour; and, in reality, there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue. The real, revered, and impartial spectator, therefore, is, upon no occasion, at a greater distance than amidst the violence and rage of contending parties. To them, it may be said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe. [...] Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest."
Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759 Part III Chap. III end.

Further reading: Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments
Michael Eldred  Social Ontology of Whoness.

Positivism Pete

You are a hard man,
slammed the door shut.
Single-mindedly fixated on power,
with an unquenchable thirst for it,
you closed off any alternative path
— seemingly.

Your vassals are steadfastly loyal,
blindly loyal.
They applaud you for your efficiency,
your effectiveness,
your productiveness,
your practical mindedness,
your wealth of knowledge,
your endless progress.
They identify with you
as their Lord,
their God.

Is there yet a turning ahead?
Is there still a slither of light
from underneath the closed doorway?
A subtle difference of shade?

Who sees it?
Are they the wayward ones?
Wrongheadedly,
perversely,
heading froward
on the path of progress?

You know how to clear them away,
ride over them.
You know how to seduce
with promises of power,
of status,
to keep your vassals loyal,
those vassals who delude themselves
that they are free.

But do the wayward ones
yet point the way forward
by walking fromward
to hazard a fresh start?

Do they find the key to reopen
the passage to freedom
you smugly thought
to have sealed off
once and for all?

Gedanken im Kopf

Marsmensch A an Marsmensch B nach der Rückkehr As zum Mars von der Erdbeobachtungsstation, die sich versteckt auf der fernen Seite des Erdmonds befindet:
A: "...Und diese Erdlinge glauben in allem Ernst, daß sie Gedanken im Kopf haben."
B (schmunzelnd): "Wirklich?!"
A: "Ja, wirklich!"
B: "Kaum zu glauben!"
A: "Sie hatten einmal ein großes Genie namens Einstein oder so ähnlich. Nach seinem Tod (ja, Erdlinge tun so was wie 'sterben') haben diese Erdlinge das Gehirn aus dem Schädel dieses Einsteins entfernt, es in kleine Teile zerschnitten und es u.a. mit Metallspitzen elektrisch traktiert, um die große Denkkraft zu entdecken, die nach ihrem Glauben im Gehirn angesiedelt ist."
B krümmt sich vor Lachen auf dem Marsboden.
A: "Und hier kommt das Beste: sie basteln sogar an Maschinen, die nach ihrem Glauben künstliche Intelligenz erzeugen sollen."
Lautes Lachen beidseits.

#Metoo

Neulich in den vermischten Kurzmeldungen gelesen: 

In einer Pressekonferenz erklärte ein Polizeibeamter, "Laut Augenzeugenberichten wurde am letzten Freitag um circa 18:15 im Nahverkehrszug Nr. 1832 eine Person mit weiblichem Hintergrund durch einen mittelgroßen, braunhaarigen Täter im vorderen Primärgenitalbereich angefaßt."

Grammatical barbarism

It has come to the attention of the government that grammatical barbarism has been seeping into the English language for centuries — and they are doing something about it! They have appointed a committee of distinguished scholars at the National Academy. A series of measures have been taken to stop the mental rot. "These sort of things are barbaric," said one committee member. "All the data is pointing to the decay, but the media is stubbornly ignoring it. This amounts to gross negligence on its part." Each member of the committee are concerned with the lax attitude toward grammatical correctness pervasive today. "I am familiar with someone that doesn't know the difference between singular and plural," commented another committee member. "From various forums we know that hardly anyone still knows about the plural and singular endings of Latin words, as if a highly infectious bacteria was being spread. As for Greek endings, nobody has a criteria any longer for telling whether a word is singular or plural." He went on, "One professor who we are acquainted with cannot distinguish between nominative and accusative case and hides his embarrassment by exclusively using 'that' as the relative pronoun for both things and people! This isn't just a matter between you and I, but needs to be made public. Social media is probably the most effective way to halt this downward spiral."

Philoblues: Degenerating Mind Blues

A scrappy philoblues to make us all feel bluesy bad. Click:

Degenerating Mind Blues

Ontological and grammatical degeneration

Any self-respecting liberal humanist soundly rejects the objectification of people. Why? Because each of us is supposed to be a subject endowed with self-consciousness and a selfhood and personhood imbued with a dignity demanding respect from others.

The language of both the everyday and of science, however, tells a contradictorily opposed story. No one has any qualms about talking of the 'inner self' located somewhere 'deep' inside. For neuroscience it is axiomatic (but nevertheless empirically non-verifiable) that the mind is located individually in each individual head, specifically, in a physical organ, the brain. (How we could ever 'be of one mind' thereby becomes a total mystery.) Neuroscientists, among other scientists, are awarded Nobel Prizes for their research into the cognitive capacities of the brain. That quintessential dimension of time, namely, memory, is supposed to be located like a storage bin in the limbic lobe of the brain, and this is supposed to have been scientifically verified and proven. The crude ontological presupposition in this is that time itself can somehow be spatialized into a where. But what is time itself? Who possesses the temerity to put (putatively) empirically-based, scientific truth into question? Anyone doing so is exposed to ridicule and is ignored as some kind of perverse 'philosophical speculator'.

Nonetheless, philosophically it is entirely visible for those willing to interrogate obviousness that, ontologically speaking, the slide from endowing human being with a whoness demanding respect to a whatness open to objective scientific investigation has long since been consummated. No ethics is capable of cleaning up this ontological mess, simply because ethics does not think ontologically; it is ontologically defenceless.

One inconspicuous symptom of ontological degeneration is the degeneration in grammar itself, which can be noticed everywhere, in particular, in the growing inability of native English speakers to distinguish grammatically between singular and plural. Another symptom is the widespread, today almost ubiquitous, use of 'that' as the personal relative pronoun of choice. Its advantage is manifest since, by replacing that fussy personal relative pronoun, 'who', it obviates having to distinguish between 'who' (nominative) and 'whom' (accusative), which English speakers have been confused about for centuries. With the all-purpose relative pronoun 'that' for both whats and whos, the tiresome cognitive effort of distinguishing between 'who' and 'whom' is eluded once and for all, and the human being itself becomes finally — and apparently irrevocably — a 'that', i.e. a 'what', subject to scientific investigation, statistical registration, state subjugation, media manipulation, advertisement targeting, and so on.

Who notices this in our consummately thoughtless times?

Further reading: Social Ontology of Whoness.

Analytic philosophy's fraudulent social ontology

Social ontology conceived as collective intentionality has become one of the burgeoning industries within the analytic philosophy establishment that has usurped hegemony over our age's mind. Spearheaded by early papers by John Searle, today there are even centres for social ontology, an International Society of Social Ontology and numerous journals dedicated to the topic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world." The sociation of this social world is assumed to be captured by a collectivity of subjective intentionality. The human being cast as an individual, subjective, interior consciousness vis-à-vis an external, objective world is taken unquestioningly as the basis for collecting into a collectivity of subjective intentionality. The individual, interior, subjective consciousness directs its attention to objects in the external world. This is called intentionality, i.e. a directedness or straining-towardness of consciousness. The individual intentionalitiies are then said to become collective via the 'property' of each individual consciousness possessing language, by virtue of which it is able to agree, via coinciding will-power, on a collective intentionality through which it is thus sociated in a social world. The existence of money, for instance, is 'explained' 'causally' as a matter of agreement, i.e. of convention. This is anything but an ontological grounding of money in its conditions of possibility as a mode of being. It is not coincidental that the initiator of analytic social ontology, John Searle, made his reputation as an analytic philosopher of language. Needless to say, the causal intentionality of the willed subject is taken for granted as a bedrock fact, and not as a deep philosophical problem, as it was by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and perhaps one or two others.

The collective intentionality constituted by willed subjects of consciousness via the medium of language is the linch-pin for what is taken for granted as intersubjectivity. If the world is populated by individual subjects that (not who) come together in some sort of collectivity, this accounts for the inter- of intersubjectivity as something self-evident. No further questions asked about this inter- which already makes massive presuppositions starting with that the human being is cast as being, first of all, an individual, isolated subject of consciousness. Behind the prefix, inter-, however lies the question of being itself, the genuine ontological question that subjectivist ontology, subjectivist social ontology in particular, never poses. By assuming simple-mindedly that the collectivity of subjects is constituted by the use of language (thus evading the question of sociation as a mode of movement), the questions concerning the logos itself and its relation to being itself and the truth of being are obliviously skipped over. Truth itself remains located in propositions, rather than prelinguistically in the disclosure of phenomena themselves. Even those scholars claiming to work in the phenomenological tradition 'argue' for their 'positions', mostly by reference to other scholars and philosopher names, without ever seriously engaging with and interrogating the phenomena themselves. After presenting their 'arguments', these purported scholars of phenomenology then draw their 'conclusions', without ever having shed light on the crucial phenomena themselves, especially the phenomenon of sociation as a mode of movement sui generis demanding its own ontology. 

Any alternative approach to social ontology deviating from a naively and dogmatically assumed social ontology of intersubjectivity is tacitly declared to be out of bounds and thus ruthlessly suppressed by the simple expedient of making it abundantly clear to any up-and-coming philosopher that she or he will ruin her/his career chances within the academic establishment by stepping out of line from the accepted prevailing orthodoxy. Academia has its own brutal methods of enforcing conformity and young academics to toe the line. This I call the disparagement and depreciation of who-status through estimating the abilities of an individual lowly in the unceasing estimative power interplays over who someone is. On the philosophical plane, this unrelenting power struggle is ultimately over the hermeneutico-ontological casting of our age. This ontological cast, however, remains invisible for an historical mind that has 'forgotten' how to think at all ontologically. Instead, all sorts of flimsy surrogates and cheap substitutes for conceptions of ontology are abundantly in circulation in the contemporary, ontologically clueless mind.

The conception of ontology underlying social ontology, namely, is even cruder than the self-evident taking-for-granted of the willed subjective consciousness and its language-mediated collectivity in some kind of self-evidently assumed intersubjectivity. As one example among countless others, I take an article published in the first, 2015 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Social Ontology, by Lynne Rudder Baker entitled 'Human Persons as Social Entities'.

Baker writes by way of introducing what she understands by ontology, "Ontology simpliciter is a complete inventory of all the entities, kinds and properties that ever exist or are instantiated. ... Ontology at time t comprises all the entities and properties that have existed at time t or before." (p.77) As is usual in all analytic ontology, the meaning of 'existence', i.e. of being itself, is taken for granted (as meaning - what??). Entities just have to be "instantiated" as some kind of fact registered by subjective consciousness in order to 'be'. Note that Baker is not disturbed by adopting the mathematized conception of 1D-linear time t to include the temporal dimension into her one-line definition of ontology. This simplistic conception ignores the long history of Western thinking on ontology, starting with Aristotle's Metaphysics and its investigation of "beings qua beings", i.e. beings simply insofar as they are beings. The "qua" or (apophantic) "as" in this initiating conception of ontology, which represents the gateway to any ontology worthy of the name, finds no place whatsoever in either Baker's or analytic philosophy's understanding of ontology. The student of philosophy is thus defrauded and grossly short-changed by this repressive orthodoxy.

This situation does not improve when Baker moves on to consider the question, "What is a Human Person?" (p. 78) whose very formulation forecloses the question whether a person can be considered hermeneutico-ontologically as a what at all. There follows the statement, "A human person is a person who begins existence constituted by an organism, but is not identical to the organism that constitutes her." (p. 78) A human person, in an eminently circular definition, is asserted to be "a person who...". This is then elaborated as, "A human person comes into existence when a human organism develops to the point of supporting a first-person perspective at a rudimentary stage, a nonconceptual capacity for intentional behavior that requires consciousness and intentionality." (p.79) This statement reveals that Baker's (and not only her) understanding of ontology is ontogenetic through and through, and not ontological at all. To talk of developing a "first-person perspective" is merely an ontic statement vis-à-vis an ontological concept such as the Kantian transcendental ego which, if you like, is also "first-person". No wonder the category of efficient causality, applied ontically, is accepted without batting an eyelid. Furthermore it is presupposed that a human organism "develops" into a subject, i.e. into a what, not a who, with "a nonconceptual capacity for intentional behavior that requires consciousness and intentionality." The dogmatic, orthodox starting-point with the individual conscious subject is merely confirmed by the asseveration that an organism develops ontogenetically into one (without ever spelling out the ontology of subjectivity itself).

The recently awakened interest within analytic philosophy and the social sciences in a topic called social ontology reveals not only a despicable paucity of philosophical thinking, but a degeneration of mind in our age that has all but lost its grip on what ontology itself, with its rich tradition in Western philosophy, properly entails and demands. For any genuine social ontology, the hegemony of the tradition ontology of whatness (quidditas, essentia, Wassein) has to be thoroughly interrogated to unearth a hitherto unheard-of ontology of whoness (quissitas, Wersein). Only then can the question concerning the sociation of whos, rather than conscious subjects, be posed at all, along with the question concerning the peculiar ontology of the movement of sociation among whos, an ontology likewise hitherto unheard-of . Today's overbearing analytic philosophy with its handmaiden status to the modern-day sciences, both natural and social, and its interminable arguments over -isms in academic positionings and posturings is not going to take us there. Rather, it will do everything in its power to ruthlessly repress any alternative questioning, any alternative thinking, any alternative ontology, and this has repercussions not only within the prevailing mainstream philosophy and not only throughout the modern sciences, but even in that kind of discourse which goes under the catch-all name of Continental philosophy, setting itself up as the critical alternative to today's hegemonic Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition. 


Further reading Social Ontology of Whoness.
    

Watch Out for You

Alternative lyrics to Alter Bridge's 'Watch Over You'

Leaves lie on the ground,
Autumn's come,
Blue skies turning grey,
Swifts long gone.

I tried to bear with you,
And wake you up,
But it was never enough,
And I must go.

Who is gonna save you from yourself?
And who'll watch out for you,
When I'm gone?

You say he'll take care of me,
As he cares for you.
Why do you let him do that
Not care for yourself?

Who is gonna save you from yourself?
And who'll watch out for you,
When I'm gone?

And when I'm gone,
Who'll shake you up?
Who'll break your sleep?
I can't go on,
Watch you ruin,
Who you could be.
Who'll set you free, set you free?

Who is gonna shake you when I'm gone?
And who will try to wake you?
And who will kick your arse since you've gone wrong?
And who'll watch out for you,
When I'm gone?

Snow lies on the ground,
Winter's here,
Who's gonna tell you now,
That you're not free?

Here's how it sounds.

Make up your brain?

You may be able to make up your mind,
but can you make up your brain?