La ignorancia creativa o el saber dialéctico

Hay dos acepciones socialmente reconocidas de la palabra ignorancia. Una es la de "no saber" y otra es la de "creer que se sabe". Cierta crítica filosófica –no siempre de ascendencia platónica– suele utilizar la última y considera a la primera como una acepción naïve. Quisiera abrir la posibilidad de una tercera. He de introducir inicialmente su antítesis contrastándola con las antítesis de las acepciones de ignorancia ya citadas. En particular quiero proponer una alternativa a la actitud filosófica de considerar como virtud el "saber lo que no se sabe". Mi inconformismo con esta actitud es porque la considero estéril. Pienso que es más fructífera una posición fluctuante. Creo que es preciso creer que se sabe para lograr una exploración profunda de la potencialidad del supuesto conocimiento que se cree poseer. No hago más pues que invocar a la crítica dialéctica. La adopción del "saber lo que no se sabe" como virtud es incompatible con la dialéctica como virtud. Ahora, hablo de una dialéctica que puede tomar lugar incluso dentro del individuo mismo. Esto es posible si se entiende a este no como una unidad sino como una multiplicidad de otros que conviven en un mismo cuerpo orgánico. Igualmente importante es la dialéctica entre individuos; se requiere un instinto social o una conciencia de nuestro aporte finito al movimiento de una conciencia (colectiva) para exponer nuestra subjetividad a la deliberación en diferentes temporalidades (incluyendo la del tiempo real que posee su propio valor, su propia soberanía) [1].  En fin, la antítesis de este saber dialéctico se descubre como toda forma estática del saber, incluido el saber de no saber.

[1] Aquí se puede contrastar entre la figura del sabio y la de opinión ciudadana (quizás el intelectual sea una etapa o figura intermedia) [1.1]. El sabio configura su saber en un espacio dialéctico muy diferente a la opinión pública. Habitan diferentes temporalidades. Esto también constituye una barrera política. Evitar el diálogo entre estos dos sujetos puede ser una forma legítima de evitar externalidades nocivas pero también puede estar asociado a formas de distinción menos honestas. El sabio al evitar la defensa explícita de su opinión prefiere recostarse en su figura institucional aportando así al fetichismo del conocimiento.

[1.1] A veces se asemeja a la relación entre un banquero y un ahorrador; el primero representa una riqueza grande pero colectiva, mientras que el segundo es acreedor de una riqueza quizás no tan grande pero personal. Aunque a menudo la anterior ecuación se materialice de forma distorsionada.

Epistemologies and Revolutions Trading in the Stock Market

Talking about the paroxysms of postmodern epistemology, facing a post-post-modern condition, it has sense to ask: what will be the role of frontiers in an hypermarket economy? In particular I am interested in the frontiers of knowledge and culture. How does the frontiers of culture distributes along society and in particular in its aesthetic non-technical dimension? The notion of periphery was a useful representation but is time to be more precise. An important case is to identify frontiers with non-human agents: e.g. the language (as in analytic philosophy) or the reception of collective voluptuosities through the aesthetic experience. We know threre is an interplay (often conflictive) between artists and critics. This is a human-human interplay. We know that artists have a non-human interplay with the voluptuosity of the collective, and with their highly free association with signifiers. From there comes their contribution to innovation. At this point is useful to distinguish two forms of innovation: the contribution to innovation mediated by aggregation (as in "more is different"). This is a form of innovation that could be associated with key words like epigenesis and programmed evolution, but also with simple emergent behavior detached of any organic pre-program. But then there is a form of innovation which is more of a disruption similar to genetic or socio-historic revolutions. The latter are noisy revolutions just as the former are rather silent. Of course, there is a lot of mimesis in this, and you can often find agents that coopt a silent innovation and announce it as their own noisy revolution when they are just the medium. Perhaps, in justice, they should be seen as false disruptors, thieves. Ironically this is ofen the people that says to safeguard the rights of the creators. 

On the Nature of Emotions: the Linguistic Deconstruction of Emotional Realism

If it hurts is real? Can't lies hurt? Aren't our dearest truths, still a fiction of language?

Synchronic language is not an exclusive construction of atemporal discourse (pragmatism, mathematics, etc.). It can be realized by the iteration of diachronic gestures –as in Bourdieu's concept of the Habitus–. Moreover, the interplay is not restricted to the extreme categories of time and no-time as suggested by the dichotomy synchronic/diachronic; it also involves intermediate structures in social space-time (aka temporality, etc.). Think on time scales such as weeks, decades, generations, intergenerations, etc. And despite Heidegger's emphasis on time, just as important, scales on social space: bacterial colonies, individuals, families, communities, nations, etc. 

In particular there is a realization of synchronic language (and as language being prior to emotions, these will lead to synchronic emotions: feelings) through the diachronic language of social relations (friends, couples, etc.). This is slightly different to the Habitus whose emphasis is on the local perpetuation of institutions [1]. The realm I want to point out (also targeted in the post: On the Nature of Emotions: Vanity Within) is that of emotions in literary realism. The personal experience of the social in its synchronic stance. But an intimate social, the relation with the family, friends, neighbors, etc. How this synchronic stance induces a form of emotional realism in which our inability to deconstruct it often leads to existential thoughts. Sartre's nothingness more than a claim on the condition of the real is a claim about the broadness of language. 

So the idea to take home from this note is that our relation with language mediates the interpretation of our feelings, and even of our emotions. Moreover, it also invents and upholds those feelings, their physical existence. It is a double feedback. Our linguistic condition is not only an intellectual condition but a social one.

Podata: Difference between emotions and feelings (a citation to Jung).

On the Nature of Emotions: Vanity Within

Consider emotions as comprised of internal (feelings) and external  (facial expressions, etc.) activities. I propose as an hypothesis that some emotions (or at least a subset of them such as "happiness" and "sadness") are elements of communication and barely anything else. This reasoning has verifiable implications. One is that a subject of emotions (e.g. a person) which is isolated from other receptors (e.g. other persons), will tend to diminish not only its external but also its internal emotional activity e.g. the solitary person will be neither happy or sad, on the long run. Mood would be understood as a social invention, as sophisticated as any other element of language. Moreover, if we push this interpretation a bit further as to say that  the internal experience of emotions is subsidiary to the external activity –after all, communication is up to semantics, an external process– then we will find a radically different perspective to understand emotions: the novice does not sings to uplift her melancholic mood; her mood is to uplift the song.

From this perspective is not crazy to say that the development of abstract language, in particular the decreasing role of analogic languages, will tend to diminish the necessity of internal emotional activity. Interestingly, we also see a realization of the analogic from the digital as a manifestation of the asynchrony, the tension, the anxiety between the pace of the format and that of the language in its wider, emotionally comprised, sense. The music may be seen as its epitome; in those societies where formal language has been largely cleaned of its analogical content, music becomes increasingly analogical. And so we can see that the refinement of the written language is paralleled by the birth of classical music. Or rap music, whose high amount of digital content (percussion, beat, prose, etc.) is paralleled by an outburst of slang, an epigenesis of emphasis which points to a revival of analogism in language. On could say that formal language and music, play at its best –or perhaps at its worst– a dialectical relation, an equilibrium of opposites [1].

 A possible experiment is to expose an emotional subject into a social environment but blockade the externalization of its emotions. Under suitable adjustment periods, this hypothesis would suggest that the subject will start to diminish its internal emotional activity given that it has become a useless burden. This experiment is not easy, many behavioral responses will get between the initial conditions and the suitable adjustment periods. To realize it we need to understand that the suitable adjustment periods can comprise weeks (hormonal relaxation) or even generations subjected to the evolutionary constraint (genetic relaxation). One of the intermediate responses is the well known self-harm driven by frustration. Within our hypothesis this could be understood as a response similar to that of a person that tries to speak louder as his voice fades. The body will tend to amplify emotions –even by self-harm– expecting to get a greater, hopefully, visible effect on its receptors. Again, by suitable adjustment periods we should be able to take the subject from this first self-strategic-response to the desired self-strategic-response associated to the "letting aside the burden of emotion". This is similar to the responses of a brain to amputation of an arm. The body will drive the regions of the brain controlling the former organ, to work in other activities or perhaps will simply switch off such regions –under suitable adjustment periods–. 

Even emotional manifestations like our expression when something is very cold or hot have a largely symbolic and therefore social nature; it is useful to show others that something is hot or cold, specially when language hasn't been developed yet or if developed, not as accurate as to transmit the relatively analogical measure of temperature perception. The whole of internal emotions as a response to extreme temperatures though, seems hard to be reduced to a social feature. It seems to comprise also a form of communication within the parts of the body –which is "social" but in another level–.

[1] This is just hypotetical (or perhaps hypo-poetical). Similar thoughts has been explored by George Steiner.

PD. It seems that "suitable adjustment periods" is the carpet to sweep the dirt under. But hopefully not totally, after all it is similar to the challenge of driving a physical system to a state of global minimal energy in the presence of local minimas.

PD2. The dialectics of internal versus external within the realm of emotions is slightly different than the dialectic of emotions versus feelings. Nevertheless, both influence each another.

Huxley's taste on the form for critical thought

Excerpt from: Aldous Huxley, The Art of Fiction No. 24, Interviewed by Raymond Fraser, George Wickes.

INTERVIEWER

Then, even though you have been writing fewer novels in recent years, you don’t think less highly of the art of fiction than you used to?

HUXLEY

Oh, no, no, no. I think fiction, and biography and history, are the forms. I think one can say much more about general abstract ideas in terms of concrete characters and situations, whether fictional or real, than one can in abstract terms. Several of the books I like best of what I’ve written are historical and biographical things: Grey Eminence, and The Devils of Loudun, and the biography of Maine de Biran, the “Variations on a Philosopher.” These are all discussions of what are to me important general ideas in terms of specific lives and incidents. And I must say I think that probably all philosophy ought to be written in this form; it would be much more profound and much more edifying. It’s awfully easy to write abstractly, without attaching much meaning to the big words. But the moment you have to express ideas in the light of a particular context, in a particular set of circumstances, although it’s a limitation in some ways, it’s also an invitation to go much further and much deeper. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard, because he writes fiction. In Kierkegaard you have this Abstract Man going on and on—like Coleridge—why, it’s nothingcompared with the really profound Fictional Man, who has always to keep these tremendous ideas alive in a concrete form. In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing—both in life and in art.