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Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature

August 22, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human NatureEmpiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gilles Deleuze continually amazes me. This incredibly tight and coherent book was written when he was only 28. it was his first book.

Here he utilizes Hume’s radical critique on induction (which is actually a critique on causation and empiricism) in order to realign not only culture and society but also subjectivity.

From here, Deleuze no longer speaks of subjectivity in his other works (for the most part). He immediately grasps the relation of subjectivity with time, as past coherences are also given in the present through a formal repetition of content deployment.

This is connection of Bergson and Freud; that process is knowledge, and the imprint of a particular process as being the “main line” highlights not only what is significant in an encounter but also significant for future encounters.

When we understand that relations are “outside themselves” as external connections that are imposed, we can grasp that subjectivities as self referential are also “relations outside themselves”. It is the process of this superimposition that creates mind, being and so on as synthetic relations of what we do. Knowledge is given to a material process. In later works, Deleuze shows the mixture of material sheets of consistency from which agency is expressed forms the partial objects of agential realism as the formation of new agencies as new material consistencies.

“Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what is”.

This is the jump as a young Deleuze pushes us beyond existentialism of a resoluteness of being into the functionalism of the 21st century.

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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

August 21, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, rules, Theory / No Comments

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the MarketsFooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

As impressive as this book sets out to be, about 1/3 of the way through Taleb sets a very impressive bar for himself. By citing Hume’s critique on induction, Taleb aligns his thoughts on probability with Hume’s critique of induction. He then nearly immediately backs off from Hume’s scathing remarks on causality to say, well, no, we don’t want to go that far, there is causality.

The rest of the book is disappointing. Despite his address on the subject in a variety of ways, Taleb never returns to tell us what rationality is or how he realizes there is causation (to separate the signal from the noise, as he likes to say).

The rest of the book is a celebration of his own rationality. Very slyly, he then insists on his own rationality with the following structure (all the while admitting that he is not totally rational but aspires to be as such, at least in his career).

He demonstrates that scientists, other stock traders, humanities academics and so on often persist on their lines of consistency because they are beholden to such positions based on their career, despite their attempts at rational argument. He then states that because he changes his mind often in his work, he is not like them. Thus, as they are irrational and he is not like them, ERGO he must be rational.

Sorry buddy, proofs by negation do not work in real life.

There are a few failings that occur out of this.

1. Despite propounding on what is not rational (an inconsistency of basis given what is actually driving their work) Taleb fails to explain what is rational.

2. Taleb insists that he understands that there is causation despite Hume’s critique of induction — but nonetheless never addresses that point. His proof by negation is repeated maybe two or three times, and then he leaves off at that. He utilizes philosophy’s context to heighten his remarks on others but neglects to engage at that level with that context when he decides to disagree with them.

3. Changing one’s mind mysteriously without explanation may be a perfectly good behavior for a stock trader, but it is not a sign of rationality. Instead, given that academics, scientists and politicians cannot change their mind because of their career, we should understand that stock traders judged on their performance MUST change their mind because marks change it for them. If stock traders are rational because they must match their career context to survive, does this also not signify the rationality of academics, politicians and scientists because their career context requires them to behave in a consistent manner? If we judge people’s behavior based off of their career isn’t the proof by negation faulty because Taleb switches basis to assess different groups? If he wishes to judge the veracity of one group on one criteria should he not also judge other groups on a similar criteria when comparing what is rational?

4. Taleb seems to take it for granted that economic thinking is what rationality is. His he wishes his discourse to be intellectually, sound he should address Hume in terms of economics, instead of just referencing him and a bunch of other thinkers as signals of his intellectual prowess.

5. Early on, Taleb states that in the long run, all strategies even out, that given profit and loss, there is a zero sum situation. Throughout the entire book, however, he states that traders who get exceedingly rich are often so because their strategies match a trend for a time. When those trends change, they will lose out. He cites his own staying power as a sign of his own rationality. Does this mean that in the end no one is rational, that he is only right “for now”? I would think that this reading does not match the desired conclusion he wishes to leave us with about rationality.

And finally, in this sense, it seems that Taleb has no conception of rationality other than whatever allows us to have staying power. If this is true then he has to take back his statements on rationality in the face of academics, scientists and so on. He should also consider that “lucky” trends like memes which are proof of human irrationality are in fact rational in their persistence.

Taleb provides little means for us to address the ideas he puts forward critically. In fact, while he is critical of others, he provides little basis for his own rational backing. This started as a promising book but ended up being very disappointing because in the end we have the IDEAS Taleb admires although in terms of actual examples, he ends up very nearly being the only example of what is rational.

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An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

January 24, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The style might be dated, but this amazing work did more than wake Kant up from his “dogmatic slumber”. While its true that Kant’s Critiques set off modern philosophy by providing an inflectional structure for us to better consider the nature of phenomenon, it’s also arguable that Kant’s critiques did not in fact adequately address Hume.

This thick, and well thought book of Hume can be summed in one statement: “If it needs explicit statement then it is not natural” While our conception of natural-ness today has been modified — meaning more (and less) than what Hume would have meant, Hume’s genius lies in grasping that what is common sense, or given as the way of things, is often a way of justifying what is. This is to say that the supposed nature of things is often a little more than a ruse, a stablizing point for social relations… that all things moral, ethical, valuable reflect our human need to determine difference of social standing between one another. It follows then that even our highest conceptions which are to provide elucidation and stability in our norms and practices are in fact methods of convention dictated by mistaking cause for effect.

This is to say that often our reasoning works backwards, to justify what we want to be, rather than working from a position of generality and finding what principles operate on the broadest terms. In contemporaneous terms, Meillasoux would all this Ptolemy’s Revenge as Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” works not to debunk a human centered universe but works explicitly to guarantee that the universe require human consciousness be at the seat of all understanding.

For this reason, many thinkers today (Deleuze seemingly the first) return to Hume as a way to balance out the “waking dogma” of Kant and his successors.

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A Treatise of Human Nature

January 2, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

A Treatise of Human NatureA Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Much simpler shorter and less expansive than An Enquiry into Human Understanding but all the same, intensely interesting.

Karatani is correct, for Hume all knowledge is synthesis save for math, and counting, which Hume doesn’t seem to be able to account for at all — so he claims such a thing is innate. Indeed, we can grasp that such an ability (counting) and spacial-motoral skills seem to be bred into us, as innate mental structures. Still, Kant in this one area is more radical than Hume, claiming that math is also synthetic knowledge.

What I found startling was a passage here, in which Hume posits in paragraph section 122, that the nature of modern enquirers understand that qualities are separate than the objects themselves. Here he lays groundwork for a phenomenal and noumenal distinction, something Kant later picks up, through the transcendental framework if abstraction… that the ideas we have are innate to us, as such ideas require material expression which we get from senses and feelings. Kant also takes serious the conjoined nature of two objects; where Hume takes sufficient reason to task, Kant understands this as an ex post facto (retroactive) synthesis, one that later on Bergson utilizes to tie together disparate fields despite their different culturally determined signifying functions.

Hume is pretty fantastic.

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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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