Existential Boundedness and Relativism

According to Mannheim, all human thought is “existentially bound” and can be properly understood only by taking into account the situation from which it arises. This applies even to philosophical thought, which claims to be unaffected by particular points of view and to embody truth as such, thus assuming absolute validity for itself. But this claim to absolute validity cannot be refuted simply by pointing out that all thinking is situation-bound. It can be seriously undermined only by tracing specific philosophies back to their origins in particular situations.

Relativizing in the context of existential-boundness is the same thing as relativism only – and Mannheim stresses this – to the extent that historical understanding is consistent with a concept of truth that is itself traditionally bound and goes back to an era in which “existentially bound thinking” had not yet been discovered.

Is this the basis for treating philosophy in a sociological way i.e. recognising the situatedness of philosophy as a social practice, while avoiding the collapse of philosophical inquiry into those conditions by rejecting a universalising theory of truth – at least in the human domain – and instead, as Taylor suggests, adopting a form of practical reasoning to ensure that inquiry can be both truth-functional and situated. 

Arendt on progress and decline

Superstition lies at the basis of all radical optimism and all radical pessimism, whose basic concepts of progress and decline resemble each other like hostile brothers. [...] Both stem from old and time-honored myths without which they cannot be understand or properly appreciated. The myth of progress presupposed that the beginning of mankind was hell and that we move forward to some kind of paradise; the myth of decline presupposes that the beginning was paradise and that from then non, possibly with the help of the original sin, we come closer and closer to hell. There is no doubt that great historians have used the progress myth while others, no less great, have used the other. But if we are serious about truth in history, we had better leave the delightful playground of mythology.

Hannah Arendt on Conspiracies

At a time when full political information, necessarily worldwide ins cope, is available only to the professional, and when statesmen have found no other clue to world politics than the blind alley of imperialism, it is almost a matter of course for the others, who vaguely sense our worldwide interdependence but are unable to penetrate into the actual working of this universal relationship, to turn to the dramatically simple hypothesis of a global conspiracy and a secret worldwide organization.

Arendt wrote this is in 1945 and it seems eerily prescient today. As the degree of interdependence has grown and the administration of the global economy become ever more opaque and depoliticised, the conditions have become even more fruitful for these sorts of simplistic political narratives to proliferate: they do away with the ambiguities and complexities of the economic and political structures of global power and instead present an image of a small group of evil men conspiring together to have their way with a naive world. Sometimes they may have the right targets but in understanding their actions in such a simplistic and easily countered way, it undermines the plausibility of more reasoned critique. Perhaps more worryingly, it comes with the potential for a very undesirable kind of political action. As Arendt writes in her essay on the Seeds of a Fascist International:

If, therefore, they are called upon to align themselves with another, supposedly secret, and in fact semi-conspiratorial, world organization, they are far from being repelled by the idea – or even from seeing anything out of the ordinary in it. They are manifestly of the opinion that this is the only way in which one can become politically active.

Could this happen with the modern 9/11 truth movement and associated groups of conspiracy theorists? You could argue that to some extent this has been happening with the American militia movement and their resistance to the New World Order.

Collection of links for asexuality research because this is a good place to store them

http://sexualities.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/5/621

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/3/4/0/p103402_index.html

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688133304/qid=1119366467/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-8948639-8247328?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684849437/103-2888314-7835015

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/publications/PDF/PrauseGrahamPDF.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexuality

http://www.indiana.edu/~sexlab/files/pr2007/Brottoetal2007.pdf

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6533

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/10/14/asexual.study/index.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2372/is_3_41/ai_n6274004

http://www.indiana.edu/~sexlab/files/pr2007/Brottoetal2007.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/fashion/thursdaystyles/09asexual.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=520063b1b0fd9ad7&ex=1275969600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10455823

http://www.asexuality.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=7&Itemid=34

http://www.asexuality.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=31

http://www.asexuality.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=58

http://www.asexuality.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=32

http://www.asexuality.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=6&Itemid=28

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=8148

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Research_relating_to_asexuality

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Asexuality

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Antisexual

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Demisexual

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Aromantic

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Hetero-romantic

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Homo-romantic

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Bi-romantic

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Pan-romantic

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Collective_identity_model

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=ABCD_types

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Dual_Definitional_Model

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Nonlibidoism

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Not_interested

http://www.asexuality.org/wiki/index.php?title=Rabger%27s_model

http://www.ellecanada.com/Trends/relationships/a-sexomatic-dealing-with-asexuality-n238459p1.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/y1g68862317t1825/

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=12219

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=7835

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=2978

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=2239

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/079145116X/ref=lpr_g_1/104-6395234-3355143?v=glance&s=books

http://www.asexuality.org/en/index.php?showtopic=34500

The idiocy of relativism

I just came across this group on facebook trying to get angry people together to make the world a better place (etc):

This is about fundamentally changing the society we live in, and that begins with each one of us. I propose a code through which we should live our lives:

1. Treat others as you would like to be treated

2. Respect other people’s beliefs – to do this, you must not assume your beliefs are right; you must recognise that other’s beliefs, views, opinions and choices are of equal value to your own; and you must not allow your beliefs to impact other peoples’ views, opinions and choices.

If other people’s beliefs are as equally valid as mine and I must not* allow my own beliefs to impact on other people then how the hell do you ever intend to justifiably make a difference to anything in the world given that there are scores of people who happen to disagree with you about what you’re trying to do? Obviously you could say this is simply an intellectual fallacy but in so far as it structures the way people approach social engagement – in this case it’s offered as a “code through which we should live our lives” – then I can’t see how it can do anything but disable the potential for actually making any change given that such change becomes  illegitimate (again, says who?) as soon as it runs up against “other peoples’ views, opinions and choices”. Though obviously the issue here is not illustrating why the above approach is flawed, anyone who sits down and thinks about it properly for a second could work that out, it’s why such an ethic has (tacitly or otherwise) wormed its way into the moral common sense of a significant proportion of my generation so that there’s a mass fallacious influence from a morally worthwhile desire to respect other people to the incoherence quoted above.

*Whose belief is this exactly and why does it take priority over my own? Or is this beleif just objectively right? If so then why on earth can’t other beliefs be objectively right and hence take priority over a duty of respect to the wrong beliefs of others?

The unavoidability of negotiation

In this otherwise excellent book I just came across a passage that really bugged me:

Transcendence matters because the tensions between freedom and justification, individuality and belonging, pleasure and suffering, cannot be resolved within ourselves, only outside ourselves. In our Enlightenment Flatland, we can turn to other people, and to a rational conception of morality. They are valuable, indispensable. They are good things, but they will tend to let us down, and we them, because we and they do not go all the way down.

I really dislike this notion that the tensions inherent to human life can find some ultimate resolution in higher reality. Part of what it is to be human is to try and negotiate between these conflicting drives and imperatives and it is, at least in part, through such negotiation and the difficult choices that perpetually recur that our identities grow and change. In some sense I think the attempt to escape these conflicts and the never-ending questions they pose represents a denial of part of what it is to be human.