my thought

An unorganized and continuously growing archive of quotes, ideas, and works that influence or represent my thought in some way across a wide range of topics, including: the nature of philosophy (and of “nature”), personal and political ethics, (anti-)metaphysics, how we should design AI, the social structure of science and knowledge, “the meaning of my life”. I think going through this may be one of the best ways to understand how I think, and I hope you find something interesting here. Continuously under construction.

Collective systems of meaning reveal important structural and geneological features of the (social) world. We should look at them and take them seriously.

• “For language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• “We are accustomed to call concepts metaphysical if we have forgotten how we reached them. One can never lose one’s footing, or come into collision with facts, if one always keeps in view the path by which one has come.” – Ernst Mach.
• “…the abnormal will throw light on the normal, will help us to penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act.” – J.L. Austin
• “Re-engineering is cumulative and is what makes our cumulative cultures possible. And any engineering project must be responsive to real world constraints, thus realism. Our social, cognitive, and cultural ways of being are no less real than the rest of the natural world, and all together leave their marks.” William C. Wimsatt, Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality.
• “Thus although our sensations, as regards their quality, are only signs whose particular character depends wholly upon our own makeup, they are still not to be dismissed as a mere semblance, but they are precisely signs of something, be it something existing or happening, and — what is most important — they can form for us an image of the law of this thing which is happening.” – Hermann von Helmholtz.
• “In fact, the confusing behaviors of “cause” strike me as similar in their developmental origins to those that attach to “force,” which isn’t altogether surprising due to the fact that the applicational demands upon the two words are closely linked. To see this, we shall examine a prototypical multiscalar architecture in which several of the popular specializations of “cause” naturally appear, sheltered within their localized pockets of homogenized message protection. Attempting to find some common “semantic” basis uniting them all in simple polysemic variation is as unlikely to produce univocal results as an allied quest for a base meaning for “force” that can submit to straightforward axiomatic regulation. The backgrounded multiscalar architecture that connects together our localized specializations of “cause” likewise contains a hidden Escherian twist that obstructs a single-minded “analysis” of this same character.” – Mark Wilson, The Imitation of Rigor

Tools must break in the right ways to help us think better. We must not be total masters. We need real, genuine, metaphysical alterity.

• It is when tools break that we switch from ready-at-hand (instrumental, engaged) to present-at-hand (theoretical, reflective) modes of being/consciousness (Heidegger).
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley: a world in which everything seemingly “works perfectly” – everyone is comfortable and has their place in society – but it is a dystopia, because nothing can break. Consider “John the Savage”: “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”
• A Clockwork Orange: Alex is made to be good; is he really good? Is he really free? Is he really human? – if there is no possibility of the break?
• Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: the master is not free, because they are dependent on the slave for their recognition.
• Designing AI tools that “break”: “Antagonistic AI”, “Intention is All You Need”, “Language Models as Critical Thinking Tools” (my paper!).
• On doing philosophy: “We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind.” – Deleuze and Guattari.
• “I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.” – Baruch Spinoza.
• “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!” – Gilles Deleuze.

Skepticism of Platonist formulations of “evil”, “suffering”, and “identity” in ethics, politics, and living the good life. It means an embrace of freedom, flux, change, and becoming; and resisting ethical essentialisms in all of their forms, whether it is from (post-)Christian thought, “woke identitarian politics”, scientific determinism, technological utopianism/doomerism, certain kinds of nationalism/cosmopolitanism.

• The “banality of evil”, Hannah Arendt. The Nazi war criminal Eichmann was not a monster, but a thoughtless bureaucrat. We must be wary that we may call others “evil” to redeem ourselves (“I would never be evil”); we must commit to thinking. Arendt writes beautifully on this:
  • “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
  • “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
  • “He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality - of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”
• “The documentary tradition is one that gives voice to the victim. For a long time, I have wondered about the function of the victim and to what extent facing the victim is, in fact, a redeeming act. I would say it’s almost a Christian situation, where you have a victim that is suffering for you [the spectator] and through his suffering he redeems the spectator and more: He says, you are human because you feel my suffering. So it comforts the spectator, [affirming his] position of being the “good one”. However, I am interested in interrogating the spectator, to ask him the question: What would you do? What are you?” – Eyal Sivan, “Against forgetting”.
• “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” – Sartre.
• “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” – Simone de Beauvoir.
• “I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.” – de Beauvoir.
• “…there are ‘moral facts’ in the sense of moral interpretations of situations where the moral concept in question determines what the situation is, and if the concept is withdrawn then we are not left with the same situation or the same facts. In short, if moral concepts are regarded as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas, then there would be no facts ‘behind them’ for them to be erroneously defined in terms of. There is nothing sinister about this view; freedom here will consist, not in being able to lift the concept off the otherwise unaltered facts and lay it down elsewhere, but in being able to ‘deepen’ or ‘reorganize’ the concept or change it for another one. On such a view, … moral freedom looks more like a mode of reflection which we may have to achieve, and less like a capacity to vary our choices which we have by definition.” – Iris Murdoch, “Symposium Vision and Choice in Morality”
• “The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a ‘one’ who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.” – Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
  • “…gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself…”
• Anxiety as the expression of our freedom and responsibility to choose, Jean-Paul Sartre. Consider the example of vertigo: we are not afraid of falling (e.g., the wind blows too hard on our backs), but that we might choose to jump.

Resisting social interpellation, even innocuous interpellation.

• “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ … the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)… individuals are always-already subjects.” – Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
• “Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” – (supposedly but probably not) Albert Camus.
• “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” – Michel Foucault

Philosophy is always reactive towards real problems, and works towards them by creating new concepts. Philosophy should not fall into Plato’s cavernous trap and delude itself of its isolated importance. But, insofar as it is engaged with problems, it is important that philosophy solves them.

• “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” / philosophy comes to understand a way of life just as it passes away; – Hegel.
• “I want to re-psychologize, re-socialize, and re-embed us in the world, where we reason about that world as well as about how we interact with and reflect upon it. Can we still be recognizably philosophical while letting the subjects of “philosophies of” shine through much more clearly and inspire new philosophies, rather than merely exporting our same old “philosophical” disputes to these new territories?” – Wimsatt.
  • “…Contrary to some philosophical views, “empirical contingencies” are crucially important to philosophy. We are embodied socialized beings: evolved and developing in a world conditioned by our sociality and technology. We steer, often unreflectively, through it with values that are uneasy combinations of history, religion, science, pseudo-science, and the latest fads-most recently the ideological preachments and short planning horizons of a “free” market. Any adequate account of reason must see it as the adaptation that it is: fallible, but selfcorrecting. And self-correcting not just through reason alone, but in the way that DNA is self-replicating-when embedded in a larger supporting complex that is both of the world and self-continuing in the world.”
• “So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.” – Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges.
  • “…We also don’t want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different-and power-differentiated - communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life.”
  • “…We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision.”
• “I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.” – Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations.
  • “…First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must “once in his life” withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer’s quite personal affair. It must arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights.”
• “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.” – David Hume.
• “We decided not to ignore the present or forget the past. We’re trying to set them aside and figure out together, not how to make the past better but how to make the future better. So, we created a bubble. We aren’t out of touch at all. Not from what happened to the Jews or the Arabs. Not from what is happening now. But, we’re applying maximum force to try and get this process moving.” – Ron Pundak, Israeli negotiator in the 1992 Oslo Accords
• “We know not through our intellect but through our experience.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
• “Geworfenheit” / “thrownness”, Martin Heidegger. We are thrown into the world, and must make sense of it. We have to begin (life and inquiry) with the world as it is, not as we would like to imagine it to be.
• “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time of peace. Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.” – Yitzhak Rabin, quoting Kohelet / Ecclesiastes, at the 1993 Signing of the Oslo Accords.
• “Thus I believe that philosophers should fancy themselves as dedicated students of the irregular. But inherited fashions within our subject presently reward ersatz rigor and armchair pontification without encouraging the informed attention to detail and practical application upon which proper conceptual disentanglements characteristically depend.” – Mark Wilson

On immanence: skepticism of transcendentalism, not answering questions, conatus, auto-poiesis, internally consistent systems of meaning.

• “The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure….you are above everything distressing.” – Baruch Spinoza.
  • “Each thing insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.” – the conatus doctrine
• “We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements.” – Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
  • “…But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad.”
• “What is X?” already frames a transcendental gesture, thus anyone who must explain the immanent meaning of X is seen as suspicious. For example, Matt Walsh gets a kick out of “What is a woman?”; Judith Butler will never be able to answer that question on Walsh’s transcendental terms.
• On genetic/direct vs. dialectical/inverse insight: “A genetic intelligibility is grasped by a direct insight into some single driving factor that keeps the development moving through developmental phases, such as found in developmental models of stars, plants, human intelligence, and human morality. A dialectical intelligibility is grasped by an inverse insight that there is no single driving factor that keeps the development moving. Instead, there are at least two driving factors that modify each other while simultaneously modifying the developing entity.” – Bernard Lonergan. There may be no genetic answer to the questions we seek.