August 2021

Problematic Ideas

The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained.

Deleuze and Guattari – What is Philosophy (p. 7)
Plato and Hume

This brief quote from the introduction to What is Philosophy? encapsulates an important theme that runs throughout not only Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works, but also Deleuze’s own works. This should perhaps be obvious if, as the quote makes clear, it is a first principle of philosophy that Universals do not explain but need to be explained. How are we to explain and account for Universals? Are we to offer a nominalist account, bringing into play the writings of David Lewis, among others, to fine tune the argument? We certainly could, and I do touch upon these types of arguments in An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics (forthcoming), where I compare and contrast Lewis’s and D.M. Armstrong’s approaches to understanding, or explaining, the nature of universals. Rather than rehearse those arguments here, however, I want to return to Deleuze, and in particular to two sources of an explanation of universals that Deleuze draws from–namely, Plato and Hume. These two sources come together, I argue, in the concept of problematic Ideas, and it is here where universals come to be explained; or it is to problematic Ideas that we are to turn in acting upon the first principle of philosophy.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Anxiety of Freedom

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dissiness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.

Søren Kierkeggard – Concept of Anxiety

In Towards a Critical Existentialism (forthcoming), I take up two common ways of thinking about freedom, popularized by Isaiah Berlin. The first is what Berlin refers to as the “’negative’ freedom,” by which he means “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree…” (Berlin 1969, 156). This seems by far to be the sense of freedom most people have in mind when they worry about their freedoms. Is the government preventing me from purchasing a gun, preventing me from going to a restaurant, football game, or to school unless I am vaccinated against Covid-19 or wearing a mask? Just a brief survey of the signs people bring to freedom rallies offers an indication of what they are concerned about—they don’t someone someone, and in particular a government, preventing them from doing what they “could otherwise do.” One attendee to the rally brought a sign saying, “My Grandma did not survive the Holocaust for me to be masked or vaxxed against my will!”; another’s read, “I call the shot not you”; and finally, a common sign at one rally in Bloomington, Indiana, read “Ethical health care equals right to refuse.” The shared sentiment, it seems clear, is that the mask and vaccine mandates are forcing a choice upon them that they ought to be free to make for themselves. Berlin refers to this sense of freedom as negative for it is a freedom from government, or it concerns itself with the space where government does not have a say in what one does or chooses to do.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

We the People…

In a news story about H. Scott Apley, a republican City Council member in Texas, who died of Covid, the writer highlights, with intentional irony, no doubt, one of Apley’s tweets from April. In the tweet, Apley responded to a doctor who had praised the Pfizer vaccine, claiming it is safe and effective, and effective against variants as well. In his response to the doctor, Apley claimed: “You are an absolute enemy of a free people.” Apley surely meant what he said, for freedom is one of those principles most agree upon, but as the previous post pointed out, what is done in the name of such universal principles sometimes results in harm being done. In the story about Apley’s death, for instance, the writer reported that there are many people who are blaming the republican party for Apley’s death since it has peddled in misinformation and skepticism about masks and vaccines, and it has done this in the name of freedom. In Louisiana, for instance, which is where I happen to live, we have had freedom rallies and protests at school board meetings where the threat, as those who attend these rallies and protests largely see it, is a government that is forcing us against our will to wear masks and get vaccinated. Why has there been so much anger and frustration vented at masks and vaccines? Why the vitriol rather than compassion, concern, and doing what one can to help during a pandemic? I want to explore a possible answer.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

“____ lives matter”

There is a lot that rides on how one fills in that blank these days. In the wake of the George Floyd killing, Black Lives Matter was a rallying cry by the many who saw in this incident yet another example of the racial inequality that exists in general in our society and that is exemplified, most terribly, in the way police officers exercise lethal force. Blacks, they point out, are much more likely than whites to die when they encounter a police officer, and black parents are much more worried than their white peers for the safety of their young adult male children should they be stopped by the police. For many others, however, the black lives matter movement ignores the fact that all lives matter, that nobody should unjustifiably lose their life.We should not single out a particular group, blacks, to rally behind and instead we need to seek justice for anyone, black or white, who wrongly loses their life at the hands of a police officer. The trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin, they point out, is an illustration of how the justice system should work in securing justice for all lives. Most police officers, they argue, are doing their job as they are supposed to, and they do so while taking on all the risks involved in patrolling the streets. After all, this line of reasoning concludes, blue lives matter just as much as black lives.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Four Problems

In my forthcoming book, An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics: Truth, Relevance, and Reality, I begin with four classic problems in metaphysics. The book unfolds from here, drawing from analytic and continental philosophers along the way, as I develop a metaphysics of problems, inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze, to address these classic problems in metaphysics. I post the four problems here as a point for possible discussion, and as a basis for blog posts to come.

§1 Problem of the New

What is new, truly new? If we say that some event or phenomenon, A, is truly new, then by what criterion do we make this claim? The most immediate answer appears to be that what is new is unlike anything that preceded it, or there are no phenomena or events prior to A that include or harbor A, for if they did then A would not be truly new but would be simply the explication of what was already implicitly present. The problem of the new may therefore not even be a problem. One could echo the sentiments expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes and resign oneself to the view that ‘what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiates 1:9 New International Version). If one does accept that there can be something that is truly novel, a reality irreducible to what has preceded it, then we have other problems that come along when one accepts this.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago