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William McKinley

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

William McKinley (The American Presidents, #25)William McKinley by Kevin Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book because somewhere I read that Karl Rove found MicKinley’s political machine to be of great value, in basing the George W Bush campaign of 2000 against Al Gore… Instead of finding a president who I thought kowtowed to East coast bankers and industry leaders, I found an extremely idealistic man who lived well. He was respectful of others, and let them run their energies against him, rather than carrying a big stick. His policies showed that he fought for the common worker, and that he utilized government for middle class values, values of freedom and liberation rather than corporate or governing dominance.

I did appreciate his analysis of how Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency built off of McKinley’s and how McKinley was able to win against William Jennings Bryan while ducking the leadership of the Republican party and the corporate NorthEasterners who might otherwise have politically hampered his ability to act on his ideals.

Likewise McKinley was shown to be a soft spoken but cautious politician who was able to carve a path for the important role the US was to play in the 20th century. I would have liked to know more about his personal life, but I guess because he didn’t keep notes or letters, that might have been difficult.

Phillip’s writing is clear. He presents political analysis with an eye on past trends and future events in a way that seems unencumbered. I enjoyed reading it. I think what Phillips is best able to do is understand the different points of view of different social bodies, and show how they saw what they saw based on what their interests were. That’s about as objective as anyone can get.

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Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Religion within the Limits of Reason AloneReligion within the Limits of Reason Alone by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In his late age, Kant presents a final last word on religion, as seen from his phenomenonal system. It’s kind of amazing that even though he was an old man when he wrote this, the church didn’t try and kill him after he wrote it.

Despite his many pleas that he isn’t writing about scripture, that this is best left to the experts in church, and he only uses this as an example for philosophy, Kant ends up writing a very damning view indeed on how religion fits in with everything else he’s already written about; ethics, subjectivity to name two subject areas.

Kant basically proposes that reason itself is insufficient to account for religion. That God and ethics are beyond reason, although reason itself plays an important part in constituting the right path to religion. While he can’t find any real natural state of man internally that is the root of good or evil, because man has free will, Kant does admittedly find that man can be evil if he chooses to be swayed by the opinions of others, to follow a sensuous path, to satisfy his own animal desires, or if he chooses to have dominion over others. In fact, Kant basically finds all forms of contingency to be evil; all ways of man to limit his focus to things in the here and now, the earthly pleasures, to be sure, but also in terms of religious rituals, in what he calls “historical faith”… that time tested ways of being faithful can be ways in which the very hierarchy of a religion can be antithetical to what ethics and morality is about.

When Kant talks about the role of the state, he means that we need an overarching state (of Being) in order to unify us, so we can be good neighbors. This seems right and fair. This primarily second point of view on us, the small other, is a way in which we can get along with one another. And yet this is not enough. He introduces a 3rd point of view, that is, religion, because we need universal principles that can objectively tell us where the boundaries of our relationship with our neighbors lie. That is to say, it’s not enough for people to negotiate the boundaries of their own social interaction, people need a third position, one that supercedes the second point of view (but does not limit it or replace it) in order to have a true ethics. This point of view is religion itself.

What’s interesting about this book is that Kant is speaking about something beyond the boundaries of what he can speak about. The limits of reason on religion is that reason itself can only service religion, it cannot define it. Instead, Kant uses this tool of reason to demonstrate (conclusively or not, up to you) how corrupt our faith can get, how “beside the point” everything can be. If God and religion are beyond us, and that’s something that seems obvious, then we can only adhere to the strictest purest point of worship, to follow the guidance of religion for its own sake. He says this pretty clearly… and it may as well be from the Bhagavad Gita: 1) do your duty (with no thought of the fruits of labor) and 2) love everyone else as your self…

With this, he lists false conclusions that corrupt these two principles. For instance, while reason is instrumental to sorting out sensuous (visible) distractions, reason itself cannot run the show, for it cannot replace the binding that religion and God can afford us, to each of us individually, and to all of us collectively.

In this sense, this book is built on the same principles of intangible, inexpressibles such as his Critiques are; understanding which cannot be expressed but through the sensuous, for example. Or the legislative law of desire, which also cannot be expressed but through the sensuous. In each, but especially here, Kant seems to say that the way to have a taste of the completeness of Being lies solely in reasoning that directs us towards a sublime. Like as in Critique of Judgement, we turn our attention outwards, towards a position in the suprasensible that cannot be felt through ecclesiastical faith, unlimited and non-contingent (unlike historical doctrine).

If anything this makes Kant a kind of neo-Plato.

Overall I thought the book was well written (or at least also, well translated). In particular, Kant writes these long sentences because he’s being very particular. He needs to outline what that particularity is, so he asks that we keep one thought in our head, while he detours it with examples, and asides. Then, we can return to the idea that has transgressed itself, and continue on (Hegel does this in extreme). So if you can get used to his unadorned language, his lengthy sentences and his complex but very specific thought, you’ll find that this book isn’t so hard to read. Kant is thorough too. He has a slight sense of humor but its always in service of this dogmatic reason, getting to the edge of what can be thought. This time, to bring us to the font of religion itself, right on God’s doorstep.

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Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

September 9, 2014 / posted in art, reviews / No Comments

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual WritingAgainst Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing by Craig Dworkin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What writing isn’t conceptual? All writing starts from a seed, or even a series of seeds, the synthesis of which is at its root, an idea…and the demand of writing be that it be coherent, consistent and end by wrapping up the displacement that started it, resolving aesthetically as pure balance. All the accounts equalled, and that’s the bonus of being complete. The simplest of such balances, of course, is morality.

Nonetheless, this writing is conceptual in the sense that other, more traditional forms of writing, are not. Kenneth Goldsmith offers an interesting essay at the start, comparing photography and painting with the internet and writing. The internet, with its textual basis (but also mixed media) releases writing from its traditional prison of realism — of trying to be a representation of the world just as photography released painting from its post-renaissance vanishing point perspective prison…and since the internet is laid over the real world, writing as a whole, with its books and non-specific ties to the planet becomes dated.

So in this sense, the title could have been called as much “against expression” just as the Abstract Expressionist painters were expressing much. The difference, of course, is that in this impressive volume, the writing is centered on writing as a concept, rather than writing as an invisible craft to create coherency, realism and so on as a deferral to another dimension.

In this sense, while much of the writing in this volume seems unanchored from the real world, at its root is always an angular concept that ties it back to how this writing is generated, as the writing itself is the item of interest.

What’s interesting is that even without the intention of creating immersive worlds, automatic writing, writing that highlights only “foot prints” of other forces in the real world, such as word choice, events like 9/11, or various other assorted, curated arrangements, we the reader still persist in creating worlds in which we meander. Traditional immersive writing ecologies, such as narrative-time-space are eshewed for the inner voices of language, the collective roar of a non-singular plurality that does not intend as much as it unconsciously desires…and in that desire creates great social distortion — of facts, relationships, defiguring much of what we do as humans on a daily basis. Much of the writing here, while unreadable, acts as a record of our own distortion… sometimes playful, sometimes sad, sometimes anything you want, this text, devoid of much intent of narrative or morality allows us a partial 3rd point of view on ourselves, so that we can see in our shadow most of all, what we are obsessed in seeing.

It’s funny that often the introduction to the piece grounds the conceptual writing as being meaningful only because it is linked in reference to an hereto unseen axis outside writing. Nonetheless, I still find problematic the title; is this expression or is it against expression? What is expressed; writing always has with it, a pre-linguistic figural meaning that is included in the act of registering language.

All in all, an inspiring collection.

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Timaeus/Critias

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Timaeus/CritiasTimaeus/Critias by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These two works together were meant to be a trilogy about Athens, Greeks and their place in the world. Unfortunately, the 3rd book was lost, or never written, and the 2nd book, Critias only survives as a fragment. Still, interesting. The three men, speak to Socartes about the nature of everything, highlighting the Other of the Greeks, the Egyptians, as being part of the primary source needed to complete the story.

The first book, Timaeus is interesting because he speaks of how the universe started before man was made… how man was made rationally with intention, and all that. With Timaeus you see how Plato tries to ground everything, the 4 elements for example, into Being, with ideas being the root… (as the 4 elements are basically tiny shapes, and what’s more pure as an idea than a shape?) From this, you get the idea that once everything is built up from Truth, we should then, with the history of Atlantis in Critias, and the lost 3rd book, come to a systematic understanding of the way in which Athens has developed and should develop… with an eye on purity and rightness.

The idea is simple. If there was a way we were made, a reason for us being the way we are, then there too is a way for us to be, an intented way for us to live, and a right way for us to not go against our nature.

Only in a democracy like Athens can someone like Plato have existed… Plato who feared the nihilism of the Sophists, in which their collectively disordered wisdom threatened to destroy the inherent meaning and values that made Athens what it is. He of course, wrote his entire life, to try and find coherence; find Being which could bind those disorderly ideas, and bring them up from negating each other, so that we can have values, so that we can have orderly society. So that we can be a people with a moral and ethical content we could be proud of and exhibit.

At least, that’s how I see this book within the larger scheme of what Plato was doing.

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Spiral Dynamics

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Spiral DynamicsSpiral Dynamics by Don Edward Beck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book because it offered an easy structure of how to classify ego growth. Plus it was from psychologists. But unlike psychology (or perhaps like psychology), this book is a mirror: it takes what is supposed to be a science of describing development and treats it as a prescriptive model for how things are supposed to be.

Having gone through the gambit now, there are a couple features I find to be puzzling. What is the swing between self and group as the focus important? And the expansion of the ego self — while expressible as a kind of hegelian dialectic (and synthesis) — why should we expect a self to follow this kind of progression? For those of you reading this review and not sure of what I am talking about, it’s simple. Hegelian synthesis happens when two unlike phenomenon, perhaps subject and object, find themselves at first in opposition, but then later coming to terms with how the boundaries between them are mentally constructed, find themselves in unity, absorbed into common ground. What Hegel is saying about our classification is simply that the process of learning also involves the process of reclassifying things so as to make greater abstractions of what difference lies between them. So to go back to why we should expect the self to follow this kind of progression: why should ego develop follow along the parameters set by the authors of this book? Why should rule based grounding qua self be between self qua domination vs self qua acceptance?

What gives the authors a bit of a cop out here is to also say that ego development in a particular spectrum can happen anytime regardless of environment. This makes sense too; that ego development has to do with how the ego sees things, or how the ego creates the world. But it is with this lesson that we step away from spiral dynamics as a science and enter the field of metaphysics. Without a determinable metric from which to gain a vantage point, we find ourselves immersed in dogmatic fields from which we cannot find any kind of orientation.

But that’s also part of the problem of the book too… that when talking about ego development, different egos reading the book will find themselves seeing the different ego positions differently. So to say it another way; depending on who you are, the book you are reading will change. This much is said in the first chapter. So how do we understand what book we are reading in the first place?

There are commonalities in the language, but we are talking about the relationships between points that makes the difference. So this book really only works by grounding itself as an objective field, using common language. But that really forces us out of understanding and into a list-view… that is to say, this book reduces people into stages without giving any kind of justification or deeper understanding as to what ego development is all about.

Perhaps I miss the point of the book. Perhaps all this is meant to do is provide some kind of application rather than a theory to understand why we are the way we are or why we should change from position to position. Again, Hegel can provide us answers to how synthesis works, and needs to work, as we reach the limits of each stage… but that’s crow-barring a theory which doesn’t distinguish what specific limitations of each stage carry… and in fact, there isn’t any explanation as to why each of the features in the spiral should be arranged the way they are, expect that one gets more and more abstract with each stage.

All in all, not a book that is terribly interesting intellectually, but it is useful if only as a quick and easy guideline.

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Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective StoryWhy Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I share Holt’s enthusiasm for his subject matter, and admire how far he was willing to go to answer the question. What I found increasingly frustrating about this book, though, was his lack of explanation as to why something did or did not make sense. For example, he gave 5 pages (I think) to talking about Hegel, half of which was atmospheric. The last page and a half were simply to dismiss it as being nonsensical without explaining why. I can appreciate quoting philosophers and other thinkers to buffer one’s argument or give a different (sometimes radical) perspective on issues, but assuming that something makes sense or doesn’t make sense doesn’t explain what sense or non-sense is… nor does it justify dismissing anything.

Holt is definitely more in the analytic tradition of philosophy than he is in any other — and while he appreciates the content area of philosophy — he falls short of really examining why or how the assumptions of language itself impacts the kind of answer he is willing to accept. This is of course, very common to analytic philosophy. So, one assumption that is simply to question is why is logic outside of reality? The proof he gives relies very much on the consistency of terms entailed by logic.

So rather than to go on, I’ll simply state that I found his questioning to be willfully based mostly (as his initial questions) on a feeling he has about nothing vs something… so it remains then, that his own feelings on things that determine what answers are acceptable or not.

If Holt went about his question by examining how the various formalizations inherent within his or any other philosopher’s discourse constructed arguments, I believe he would have found the ways in which meaning are made, and why philosophers who often try and tackle [nothing vs something] often run into the problem of spouting nonsense to support sense. How one discourse creates the limitations of its own inherent reality is simultaneously how that discourse grounds itself as reality and maintains its consistency and coherency. Another way of putting this objection I have is to say that Holt gives too much attention to the content of the words others use and not enough attention to how context deploys those words… additionally while he contemplates many different positions, he ends up rejecting most of them for reasons he does not explain… which makes it frustrating to read because whenever he fails to explain why he rejected a position, Holt will resort to a story or a narrative to invoke feelings… As if the horror of one philosopher is the same horror of another… and that’s how we equate them. So if one set of words doesn’t jive with him, then he seems to assume it won’t jive with us either.

I suppose though that it makes sense that he starts his journey with a feeling and he ends it also on another feeling… in the end, philosophy for him may be a way of coping (as it can be argued that all things are ways of coping) but the real weight of his argument lies in whatever gives him the (feeling of) satisfaction he is looking for… though I suspect that this satisfaction is based on some hidden assumptions as to what kinds of moves are allowed rather than radically being a philosopher and allowing all any kind of move, and eliminating those that self cancel. Truth may be another way of saying what feels warm like home, but that’s still based off the naive idea that in the end, words mean the same thing to different people and that language can be used with precision lacking ambiguity… which is an obviously willful denial that analytical philosophy (along with many philosopher-scientists) have adopted in their pursuit of making meaning for everyone… when really they at most only make meaning for themselves instead of describing it for everyone (for everyone else, this productivity is a kind of prescribing because of how they assume language is a stable mediator).

In this sense, this book is less of a book of philosophy than a book about philosophy. Still, he put much effort to go to these places, and meet all these people I haven’t read before and that’s impressive.

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Essays

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

EssaysEssays by David Hume
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

David Hume was one of those late bloomers. His mum thought him daft until he started to become famous because of his writing. In reading this collection, you can see how plodding he is in his thinking. Perhaps he seemed daft because of how he questioned. While this collection is just a loose set of essays, you can detect in him a critical ruthlessness in examining what the basis for anything is. Hume seems to have found, even before Foucault, a human assumption that what works for us should also serve as justification for our behavior and reasoning… that is to say, how things appear based on what we want determines the conventions of what we assume to be factual in the world. That is, we see not only what we want to see, but we also see what we look for. In particular his examination of civil liberties, his examination of political parties… finds at its root the particular interests of each of the players. From that interest, Hume is able to draw a line to developing the conceptual boundaries of where each actor resides, and how those boundaries always-already serve the interests of that actor in a self-justification that isn’t seemingly gradual but rather, spontaneous.

What Hume lacks in these essays is a coherent system of analysis. Perhaps he is able to draw that up later on, but I am reminded very heavily of how Foucault examines discourse diachronically in order to show how our current divisions were created through the discourse via power or its corollary, resistance. Hume doesn’t seem to have this same kind of genealogical examination of discourse at his disposal, but he does involve in a diachronic tracing of trends and party lines as they evolve into groups that spontaneously self-justify just as they separate from each other in fierce opposition.

One of the reasons Hume might have taken so long to bloom is that he was too busy learning and confronting the assumptions that others have of the world. If you question too much and don’t understand what’s going on, I suppose you would appear daft to anyone else. Most likely, to come onto his own in his analysis, Hume needed to defer answering what he was looking at, until he finally came to the understanding that there is no universal. If he believed in a kind of universal ground to base everything from, he certainly didn’t rely on it in any of these essays.

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Nature’s Law: The Secret of the Universe

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Nature's Law: The Secret of the Universe (Elliott Wave)Nature’s Law: The Secret of the Universe by Ralph Nelson Elliott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

How to see this? No doubt it’s interesting that people have noted this golden ratio throughout the ages, and it’s interesting to see it parroted in nature. But without understanding why it happens or how it happens, all Elliott can really say is how to measure it.

In fact, apparently, even finding it in the stock market requires some attention, lots of chart and lots of time to decide what ratio to use in order to ‘uncover’ the hidden features involved. Questions as to what the proper time scale is, or what the correct amounts (inflation adjusted or not) obscure the finding.

Should we understand that this structure is absolute, then we are beholden to find it no matter what. What I wonder is, if the stock market is to be considered mostly random (that is to say too complex to be analysed) should we still be able to trace this sequence out of random numbers, if we fiddle with out metrical tool enough? That we can change the scope of how we see until we find what we are looking for… Without determining an outer bounds for establishing objectivity, this seems like a senseless exercise to simply find a pattern which is both inexplicable and undecipherable. After all, we may know when it goes up, or when it will go down (it’s always a matter of time) but for serious investors, there is always the lost opportunity cost of waiting indefinitely for price adjustments which we know to be coming, given all of time.

Elliott was definitely enthusiastic but that didn’t translate into something I could hang onto in reading this.

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The Way of All Flesh

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

The Way of All FleshThe Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Butler may not have adhered to any school of thought but I found in this a strange quasi-mixture of both existentialist and naturalist thinking. The damnest thing that Butler has done is to trace lineal history, as some kind of psychoanalytic background, in order to create a mesh that would explain the particularity of the main character Ernest’s upbringing.

In fact, the climax of the work, if there is indeed one, comes in pretty late when Ernest is forced into prison and nearly dies because he is forced to face the complex contradictory impulses of those around him. Ernest learns that he has to lead his life rather than relying on the life-narrative of others who would seek to justify him as being this way or that. That is to say, for Butler, coming onto his own is synonymous with being self defining.

Butler fiddles with some vague notions of evolutionarism, to explain lineage, in this case, a kind of genealogy of discourse, but really, for Butler, Ernest is able to come onto his own as an enlightened figure when he steps out of the discourse of church and state; to see political domination as the goal of the very power structure claiming to be enlightened. This seems to be enough for Butler to claim that Ernest has a kind of null point of view now; one that allows him both to see through the BS of his family and the BS of the institutions and culture that surround him in Victorian England.

What’s really kind of stupid about this is that of course Butler has it in for store that Ernest should become wealthy and independent. Without this kind of independence he could never come onto his own. He could never truly stand validated to write books that are reviled by critics but acclaimed by a public… that Truth is always visible to the masses even if individuals cannot see it; that social validation through publication must also equate with economic validation (the freedom to travel and be truly an international citizen, unbeholden to any kind of culture or wage-slavery)… the ending is too easy. A real critique of Ernest’s new ideas would be for him to have to live in a kind of hellish double-vision, seeing the fraud of his Victorian Era but still needing to make a living in it. Butler avoids this complicated ending though, because he wants to establish Ernest as seeing the way out (of his personal and cultural history) but not ever challenging Ernest to really live up to a particular content.

Because, it may be too hard to say, that for Butler just getting by was important enough… validation, once it was thrown out, was no longer needed by Ernest. He could then be rich without ever getting tied up in the validation game that others enslaved him with, all his life. So

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance different but little from the indifferentism from which Mr. Hawke had arosed him

This brings us to the font of nihilism; that ghost of existentialism which lay us bare to one another. In this, perhaps survival was enough, depending on however you wanted it. Perhaps this was too easy an ending; but then Butler didn’t seem to want to set out an answer to the query; he just wanted to point out the critique of there ever being a standard answer to the question in the first place.

Over all, this is a very materialist book, but one in which we can get no answer from, other than, gee, how nice is is to be rich and not care about anything…and in that sense, Butler can be seen to be far more conservative than he already is as he sees political domination to be a separate issue from economic privilege.

After all, it’s very easy to criticize everything if you can be independent of it all.

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Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World Religions

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World ReligionsRethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World Religions by Brian D. Lepard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty much all wars are made in the name of peace. Either side fighting the war, generally claim they are entering the conflict with the intention of settling issues which cannot be settled in any other way.

For this reason, determining when military intervention can occur (for humanitarian reasons) is key to determining what is an act made in the name of peace and what is not.

Part of the form this determination should take, is the same form that multiculturalism and democracy have found to be the most practical…in other words, determination should be as “objective” as possible, meaning that it has to be beholden to a process. And the way processes are objective is that they are the same for everyone. Thus, for Lepard, the U.N. must adopt a formalized, unambiguous process for deciding when peacekeeping measures (in the form of military intervention, perhaps) should happen! And all nations must adhere to this.

In a way, Lepard wants to define when peace with military action is still peaceful, in order to do so for purely humanitarian reasons. He backs this up with several of the world’s most prominent religions (though Confucianism may or may not be a religion). In the process of doing so, Lepard wishes to highlight the idealized shape that most of humankind recognizes as being necessary for good living, for proper and stable society, for how people ought to get along. In essence, this other view, is often a 3rd point of view of human reasons, in the same way that Kant used religion to seal how humans, who struggle with good and evil, should live together in a state. Religion in this sense, gives us a pre-formed image of being human so that we can all be on the same page as far as boundaries are concerned. And believe me, pretty much all human interaction has to do with defining and re-defining boundaries.

Read sideways Lepard would want us to adhere to the U.N. in the guise of a religious institution… not in the sense of worship, but in the sense of allowing it have the final word on what kind of people we are to be. That’s certainly not his intention though, but at the onset, he does want the U.N. to reflect the better part of humanity’s values as individuals rather than what world leaders would want for the rest of us.

All in all, I found his book to be a bit boring as it was highly repetitive. His language is formalistic, academic and thus not the most existing thing around. Nonetheless, I found his thoughts interesting. Given that much of the U.N.’s many articles are ambiguous or at times, lacking procedure, much of his text ends up reading as a series of “he said, she said” kind of back and forth between nations trying to save face and nations pushing for certain agendas. His thought that the permanent members vetos should be reduced in authority is well taken, as much of the other nations seem to be keenly interested in introducing verbiage that limits that power.

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