PSR

PSR, Nihilism, and Dialectic of Enlightenment

The dualization of nature as appearance and sequnce, effort and power, which first makes possible both myth and science, originates in human fear, the expression of which becomes explanation. It is not the soul which is transposed to nature, as psychologism would have it; mana, the moving spirit, is no projection, but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (p. 15)

In the next few posts I want to begin exploring the relationship between the PSR (Principle of Sufficient Reason) and our effort to make sense of our lives. The latter concern may seem to be a subset of the former – after all, if the PSR calls for an explanation for why things are as they are and not otherwise, then this would also include, apparently, an explanation that accounts for and explains our lives. This could not be further from the truth, however, as became increasingly apparent to many 18th century philosophers who began to think thorugh the implications of Spinoza’s rationalism, and its attendant reliance upon the PSR. In particular, many saw in Spinoza a nihilism whereby nothing in our life means anything but is simply that which follows from the necessity of God’s nature, and it is God’s infinite nature that explains, in the end, our existence. This explanation, however, does nothing to give meaning to our existence, or so the critics of Spinoza argued, and thus Spinoza’s reliance upon the PSR is not, on this view, in line with our effort to make sense of, and find meaning in, our lives.

(more…)
By Jeffrey Bell, ago

King Omicron

…the idiom of war between king and people draws on and is expressive of an even deeper structural reality—the ability to step outside the moral order so as to partake of the kind of power capable of creating such an order is always y definition an act of violence, and can only be maintained as such…This is not just war; it is total war. Insofar as the sovereign intends to apply such compulsion to an entire population within a given territory, it ultimately must always be. (The only limitation on such total war is that the sovereign cannot wipe out the entire population, or his sovereignty would itself cease to exist.) Hence…the tendency for modern states to frame their greatest projects in terms of some sort of unwinnable war: the war on poverty, crime, drugs, terror, and so forth

David Graeber, “Notes on the politics of divine kingship”
COVID-19 virus SARS-COV-2 OMICRON strain, covid-19 South African variant B.1.1.529 omicron 3d rendering

With the omicron variant spreading rapidly throughout the world, quickly overtaking the delta variant as the dominant strain infecting people now, the media coverage of omicron has highlighted a key motivation behind biopower, to use Foucault’s term. Namely, the health of a population becomes the justification for policies and powers that rely on the perpetuation of the very fears that lend legitimacy to the powers in the first place. These fears, however, are at the heart of sovereignty itself in that its power involves the power to kill, or it is a power at war with the very people over whom the power is wielded. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, Graeber points out that Schmitt reminds us, appearing “like some embarrassing uncle,” that “sovereignty…consists above all in the ability to set the law aside” (458). Moreover, Graeber adds, and with recurrent events no doubt in mind, when the “police regularly get away with murder [they] are simply exercising that small–but lethal–bit of royal power that has been delegated to hem by its current holder, an entity we refer to as ‘the people'” (ibid.). But such powers only emerge intermittently, and the war between sovereign power and those over whom it is exercised settles, Graeber argues, into an uneasy truce that takes on various forms including, for instance, the modern state’s unwinnable wars on ‘poverty, crime, drugs, terror,’ and omicron.

(more…)
By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Strange Encounters II

As I concluded the previous post, I argued that the Deleuzian extension of Hume’s project entailed both the affirmation of monism (Spinoza) and multiplicity (Hume). This point is made crystal clear in A Thousand Plateaus when Deleuze and Guattari announce that “pluralism = monism” (ATP, p. 2; see this earlier post where I discuss this theme in the context of William James’ radical empiricism). This effort to bring Hume and Spinoza together, however, is fraught with difficulty, or at least apparently so, in a philosophical landscape that has been forever altered by Kant’s project. Since Kant was woken from his dogmatic slumber, Hume and Spinoza have come to be rethought, if rethought at all, in the context of the conditions for the possibility of experience. In the case of Hume, this has largely led his philosophy to be read as a project in epistemology. Hume comes to be seen as a precursor of a Bayesian epistemology whereby knowledge comes to be constituted through a process of induction that constitutes degrees of belief. Spinoza, at worst, is thrown into the refuse pile of philosophical dogmatists, one of the philosophers who accepted, without question, that guarantees of our knowledge. Spinoza, in fact, goes much further than either Descartes and Leibniz in that while they accept God as the unquestioned guarantor of our knowledge of the world (Descartes) as well as the harmony of the world itself (Leibniz), God remains inaccessible and unknowable; Spinoza, by contrast, argues in the last half of Part 5 of the Ethics that even God can be known.

To state the contrast between Spinoza the dogmatist and Hume the skeptic, one could say that Spinoza presupposes the identity that grounds knowledge while Hume argues that this identity comes to be constituted. Husserl remarked upon this aspect of Hume’s thought, and it is for this reason that I have argued for a Humean phenomenology (see this). So how then can one bring Hume and Spinoza together? Put simply, through a rethinking of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). And this brings me back to the issue that in part spawned the New Hume debate – to wit, Hume’s claim that the “particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed” are powers that provide the reason for the regularities of nature but these powers “never appear to the senses.” What are these powers? The simple answer to this question is that these are the laws of nature that are the subject of natural science, and it is precisely the nature of these powers that are revealed, over time, through the process of scientific enquiry. We could say that this is a scientific explanation of facts. That which appears to the senses, therefore, would bring in our mental faculties and the epistemological problems of how we come to know the “particular powers” of nature. With this we have an epistemological explanation, and form here we are not too far from the Bayesian epistemology mentioned above.

(more…)

By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Strange Encounters

One of my favorite passages from Hume actually occurs twice – in the Treatise and the Enquiry. This is the passage where Hume offers up the example of the man with normally functioning faculties who is suddenly placed into a strange, unfamiliar environment. This is the lesson Hume draws from this thought experiment:

For ‘tis evident, that if a person full-grown, and of the same nature with ourselves, were on a sudden transported into our world, he wou’d be very much embarrass’d with every object, and would not readily find what degree of love or hatred, pride or humility, or any other passion he ought to attribute to it. The passions are often vary’d by very inconsiderable principles; and these do not always play with a perfect regularity, especially on the first trial. But as custom and practice have brought to light all these principles, and have settled the just value of every thing; this must certainly contribute to the easy production of the passions, and guide us, by means of general establish’d maxims, in the proportions we ought to observe in preferring one object to another. (T 2.1.6, 293-4)

In the Enquiry Hume slightly modifies the example:

Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another, but he would not be able to discover any thing farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of any thing beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses. (EHU 36).

(more…)

By Jeffrey Bell, ago