The stubborn horse that refuses to open its mouth (mind) in this case is personified in the 'secular humanist'. Unable to perceive the irrelevance of atheism in the context of a post religious (non theist) era, the secular humanist hangs on to a rigid ideology with the same basis as that of the fundamentalist theists, who on their side are also unable and unwilling to recognize that the reality in which they live is post-Christian and that it's no longer a question of apologetics for faith. Apologetics are worthless in the face of the complete irrelevance of theism itself.
Asking thinking to speak on the level of scientism or religionism is holding it to a standard that doesn't measure up to it.
The root theo preexisted the notion of a substantial being referred to as 'a' god, it was purely verbal with no nominal formulation. Theo in the current context refers simply to the 'Event'. Study of the Event is the ground of studies in any particular regional ontology.
The area of theology that in a religious context studied 'a' god, its implications and correspondences or contradictions with religious tenet, becomes the study of the evental, the transformative, a purely verbal posit with no nominal (or noumenal) formulation.
The other facets of theology, namely theology of the psyche and theology of nature encounter similar changes in meaning on this side of the epochal break.
Theology of the psyche, of course, includes all the 'human sciences', depending on whether one is discussing the individual or collective psyche. Theology of nature includes all the 'natural sciences'. Each sub-study of psyche or nature has to be re-grounded in the evental, only then can questions of appropriate methodology be attended to.
Reformulating things in this terminology sounds alien to many, if not perverse. But aside from the important advantage gained by tossing the cartesian language and its resulting subjectification, isolation and mechanization of beings a priori reduced to meaningless objects, it self-excludes the contingent of closed minded ideologues that have turned 'science' into scientism, a religion of its own with all the negative features of fundamentalist religionism without even the possibility of forgiveness for one's anti-scientistic sins, the most deadly of which is, of course, any questioning of the tenets of scientism.
Thinking is tired of stubborn horses that won't open their mouths to drink. They are welcome to their ideology of a reductive universe dehydrated of meaning.
Thinking is and always has been heretical. It is time for heresy to be honest about what its real opponent and opposite consists in. That opposite is, and alwaya has been, Stupidity.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Post Religious Theology, Fundamental Ontology and Non Philosophy
Some years ago I heard a minister in the United Church of Canada deliver a sermon discussing the meaning of Christianity in a post Christian era. Heidegger's early description of his enterprise as 'fundamental ontology', while in many ways abandoned as his work progressed, retains some cogency as a descriptive. Laruelle's Non-Philosophy, by its nature a quirky term (certainly Laruelle doesn't intend his work as a hatred of wisdom), while it may distance him from some of Heidegger's early, necessary, but temporary enmeshment with metaphysics, in other ways intends many of the same tendencies of thought as the later Heidegger, a Heidegger of course only possible on the basis of the accomplishments of the earlier. Non-Philosophy's odd relation with thinking as the end of philosophy seems at times merely an unnecessary formalization.
The line between philosophy in its non-metaphysical guise and speculative theology in a situation where god as a being is no longer posited blurs and recoils upon itself in multiple ways. Theology without a substantive being as its posit is in no way the same thing as the 'Death of God" theology, which remains within the posit of a substantive being, simply one that is no longer present but only past. Heidegger's 'thinking as thanking' implies a theological thankfulness that is no longer directed at a substantive being. Thinking is thanking no-thing, then, yet it remains a thanking. Saying is obligated by no-thing, but the obligation remains.
If anything that obligation grows all the stronger.
The revealing that is technology has already revealed a good deal to a nuanced eye. That much of the revelation took place in the most technical of sciences first then is not surprising. While other sciences meander between cartesian and postmodern definitions of their basic posits, or have lost contact with their base posit to the degree that each 'theory' is really another attempt at founding the science itself without understanding the nature of foundation, at least in the quantum and thermodynamic areas of physics the metaphors of metaphysics have had no meaning for a fair time.
Philosophy it seems, by its nature, is agnostic. Is the philosopher, though, also by nature a Gnostic? Is it possible to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, today reincarnated as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's hands, the impotence and uselessness of understanding wonderfully and wittily unable to share any transparency with the irrelevance and thoughtlessness of explanation?
Theism and atheism continue their bickering as two sides of the same coin, still probabilistically coming up heads or tails in their coveted determinism, but it's fiat money that lands on the table with a flat sound like the aluminium coins of the old East Germany, and like those coins, guaranteed by a World that no longer exists.
Behind all of the madness (pairing its nails perhaps?), and biding its time, the post religious collection of stories wrought with a complexity and severity beyond any testaments, Finnegan's Wake, reincarnates the Word itself in its newfound, though ageless, unsubstantial power.
The line between philosophy in its non-metaphysical guise and speculative theology in a situation where god as a being is no longer posited blurs and recoils upon itself in multiple ways. Theology without a substantive being as its posit is in no way the same thing as the 'Death of God" theology, which remains within the posit of a substantive being, simply one that is no longer present but only past. Heidegger's 'thinking as thanking' implies a theological thankfulness that is no longer directed at a substantive being. Thinking is thanking no-thing, then, yet it remains a thanking. Saying is obligated by no-thing, but the obligation remains.
If anything that obligation grows all the stronger.
The revealing that is technology has already revealed a good deal to a nuanced eye. That much of the revelation took place in the most technical of sciences first then is not surprising. While other sciences meander between cartesian and postmodern definitions of their basic posits, or have lost contact with their base posit to the degree that each 'theory' is really another attempt at founding the science itself without understanding the nature of foundation, at least in the quantum and thermodynamic areas of physics the metaphors of metaphysics have had no meaning for a fair time.
Philosophy it seems, by its nature, is agnostic. Is the philosopher, though, also by nature a Gnostic? Is it possible to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, today reincarnated as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's hands, the impotence and uselessness of understanding wonderfully and wittily unable to share any transparency with the irrelevance and thoughtlessness of explanation?
Theism and atheism continue their bickering as two sides of the same coin, still probabilistically coming up heads or tails in their coveted determinism, but it's fiat money that lands on the table with a flat sound like the aluminium coins of the old East Germany, and like those coins, guaranteed by a World that no longer exists.
Behind all of the madness (pairing its nails perhaps?), and biding its time, the post religious collection of stories wrought with a complexity and severity beyond any testaments, Finnegan's Wake, reincarnates the Word itself in its newfound, though ageless, unsubstantial power.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Dawkins' Intellectual Dishonesty, or Why Dawkins Should Be Sent Down
This quote is from Dawkins 'rebuttal' to Not in Our Genes, a book by Lewontin and others that criticizes Dawkins obsessiveness with the genome as the only means of inheritance.
"So, life is complex and its causal factors interact. If that is "dialectical", big deal.
But no, it seems that "interactionism", though good in its way, is not quite
"dialectical". And what is the difference?
" . . . First (interactionism) supposes the alienation of organism and
the environment.... second, it accepts the ontological priority of the
individual over the collectivity and therefore of the epistemological
sufficiency of..." (emphasis mine).
There is no need to go on. This sort of writing appears to be intended to
communicate nothing. Is it intended to impress, while putting down smoke to
conceal the fact that nothing is actually being said?"
After reading Popper's quilt quoting of Hegel to make points he couldn't have made if he had any comprehension of Hegel whatsoever, it no longer surprises me to see this kind of intellectual dishonesty from a supposed scientist. But let me continue.
Quoting half a sentence, then claiming that "nothing is actually being said" is the height of "putting down smoke". The sentence chosen is interesting, if only psychologically, because it is at the crux of the most cogent criticism of Dawkins' views. If he does quote the sentence fully and the reader does understand the terms involved it will at least put Dawkins' enterprise into severe question in the reader's mind. Dawkins' ideas on the genome as replicator, as with all simplistic natural selection, view the environment as a fixed, external reality that is not affected by the organism as much as vice versa. Dawkins' emphasis on the genome as the focus of evolution with the organism playing the role of mere vehicle is precisely a flagrant dismissal of the notion of ontological priority.
Now that the human genome project has demonstrated that genes in fact are evental, and behave more like elements of a language, meaning something specific only in an actual cellular and organism/environmental context, Dawkins' actual views on the genome are no longer materially cogent in any case.
But that his views' lack of cogency originated in unquestioned assumptions that proved dead wrong combined with a lack of comprehension of basic philosophy (thinking), together with his intellectual dishonesty in this feeble attempt to defend himself from accurate criticism, leaves his views on other matters suspect, if not to be completely ignored. If an undergraduate at Oxford handed in a paper with the above he would not simply be failed, but 'sent down' (i.e. kicked out of the university permanently) for intellectual dishonesty, yet a man capable of publishing this in a scholarly journal was given the Simonyi Professorship at the same school?
It's time to take note of Dawkins' intellectual dishonesty along with his scientific ignorance and ideological rigidity as the major characterizations of his work. Together they add up to the Dawkins we know - the loudmouthed charlatan who is determined to turn science into a religion.
Quote taken from Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature
by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and R.C. Lewontin (Pantheon Books, 1985)
Reviewed by Richard Dawkins in "Sociobiology: the debate continues", New
Scientist 24 January 1985
http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/Dawkins.pdf
"So, life is complex and its causal factors interact. If that is "dialectical", big deal.
But no, it seems that "interactionism", though good in its way, is not quite
"dialectical". And what is the difference?
" . . . First (interactionism) supposes the alienation of organism and
the environment.... second, it accepts the ontological priority of the
individual over the collectivity and therefore of the epistemological
sufficiency of..." (emphasis mine).
There is no need to go on. This sort of writing appears to be intended to
communicate nothing. Is it intended to impress, while putting down smoke to
conceal the fact that nothing is actually being said?"
After reading Popper's quilt quoting of Hegel to make points he couldn't have made if he had any comprehension of Hegel whatsoever, it no longer surprises me to see this kind of intellectual dishonesty from a supposed scientist. But let me continue.
Quoting half a sentence, then claiming that "nothing is actually being said" is the height of "putting down smoke". The sentence chosen is interesting, if only psychologically, because it is at the crux of the most cogent criticism of Dawkins' views. If he does quote the sentence fully and the reader does understand the terms involved it will at least put Dawkins' enterprise into severe question in the reader's mind. Dawkins' ideas on the genome as replicator, as with all simplistic natural selection, view the environment as a fixed, external reality that is not affected by the organism as much as vice versa. Dawkins' emphasis on the genome as the focus of evolution with the organism playing the role of mere vehicle is precisely a flagrant dismissal of the notion of ontological priority.
Now that the human genome project has demonstrated that genes in fact are evental, and behave more like elements of a language, meaning something specific only in an actual cellular and organism/environmental context, Dawkins' actual views on the genome are no longer materially cogent in any case.
But that his views' lack of cogency originated in unquestioned assumptions that proved dead wrong combined with a lack of comprehension of basic philosophy (thinking), together with his intellectual dishonesty in this feeble attempt to defend himself from accurate criticism, leaves his views on other matters suspect, if not to be completely ignored. If an undergraduate at Oxford handed in a paper with the above he would not simply be failed, but 'sent down' (i.e. kicked out of the university permanently) for intellectual dishonesty, yet a man capable of publishing this in a scholarly journal was given the Simonyi Professorship at the same school?
It's time to take note of Dawkins' intellectual dishonesty along with his scientific ignorance and ideological rigidity as the major characterizations of his work. Together they add up to the Dawkins we know - the loudmouthed charlatan who is determined to turn science into a religion.
Quote taken from Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature
by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and R.C. Lewontin (Pantheon Books, 1985)
Reviewed by Richard Dawkins in "Sociobiology: the debate continues", New
Scientist 24 January 1985
http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/Dawkins.pdf
Friday, March 12, 2010
Preface to Book, or Why Phenomenology Overrides Science in the Study of the Psyche
Studying Art History, my wife spent a good deal of time looking at various things such as statues of the Buddha in various cultures. As part of these studies the abilities of the natural sciences were utilized, as well as the methodologies of history and art history in particular.
Natural science, for its part, can tell you many interesting things about a statue of a Buddha. It can give you its measurements to uncanny detail, its composition, approximate age, the probable locale from which the stone was quarried and the distance to where the statue was located, the exact physical latitude and longitude of that location, etc. I could go on and on.
And yet for all the natural sciences can add to the repertoire of knowledge an Art Historian has regarding a particular statue of the Buddha located in a particular place in the far east, it all remains a more or less irrelevant addendum. To those not familiar with the different sciences, their different realms of study, methodologies and applicability this may seem either simply odd, or part of some “unscientific” plot to keep the natural sciences out of art history.
So what is it that the natural sciences cannot tell us about the particular object of study that we have in front of us, a statue of the Buddha from any given ancient eastern culture?
Firstly, as an object, there is nothing theoretically or practically of importance that the natural sciences cannot tell us. True, on a quantum level there are things that are indeterminate even theoretically, but they don't really impact the type of knowledge that art history is. But we didn't begin by discussing an 'object'. We began by discussing a statue, in this case of the Buddha.
No matter how accurate the natural sciences can describe the objects form and material composition, nothing in its properties can determine for science that the object is, in fact, a statue. 'Statue' is not a determination of an object at all, it is a determination of a thing. 'Things' always exist in and for a World of comprehension and form part of that world of context and meaning. The 'historical' part of art history deals with this statue precisely in its context and meaning as a thing, and with a rigor unknown to the simple exactness of natural science attempts to reconstruct some of that World of meaning that gave birth to the thing.
We aren't finished with the statue by examining its thingliness in the context of its world (or ours), though. It is not simply a statue, but a statue of the Buddha. History exhausts itself in its determinations of the statue as situated, contextualized thing, but we are looking at it through the methodologies of art history, not simple history. As art the statue is a Work, a work that reveals the Buddha by presenting the Buddha.
As a result of a myth that crept into simplistic art history at some point, and has been difficulty to stamp out, there is an idea that art somehow 'progresses'. Concomitant with that myth is the myth that art is by and large 'representational' in nature. It results, in the worst cases, in the notion that pictorial art was some type of primitive method of photography that 'progressed' to higher and higher realism but has now been replaced by 'real' photography and continues as some sort of 'cultural' curiosity.
In contrast to this, the statue of the Buddha does not represent, because nothing was presented formerly that could then be re-presented. It is also not symbolic, it does not function as a symbol of something that somehow exists similarly but differently elsewhere as in the semiotic signifier/signified pairing. It makes as little sense to say that the statue is not the Buddha as it does to say that the statue is the Buddha. The statue reveals the Buddha. It also makes no sense to say, well, perhaps it does for Buddhists, but not for rational westerners. Belief is not at issue in the statue, because it was not at issue in the World that the statue hails from. Belief implies the choice between belief and doubt. One can, I suppose, doubt that trees exist, but it doesn't make one a more rational westerner, it makes one of interest to psychiatrists. The same goes for the statue of the Buddha within its context.
Why did natural science have no means of looking at the meaning either of the thing as a statue, or the work as the Buddha? Natural science doesn't deal with things, or works, fundamentally it deals with objects, which is to say it doesn't deal with meaning, understanding, or truth, but with description, explanation, and correctness.
Natural science, for its part, can tell you many interesting things about a statue of a Buddha. It can give you its measurements to uncanny detail, its composition, approximate age, the probable locale from which the stone was quarried and the distance to where the statue was located, the exact physical latitude and longitude of that location, etc. I could go on and on.
And yet for all the natural sciences can add to the repertoire of knowledge an Art Historian has regarding a particular statue of the Buddha located in a particular place in the far east, it all remains a more or less irrelevant addendum. To those not familiar with the different sciences, their different realms of study, methodologies and applicability this may seem either simply odd, or part of some “unscientific” plot to keep the natural sciences out of art history.
So what is it that the natural sciences cannot tell us about the particular object of study that we have in front of us, a statue of the Buddha from any given ancient eastern culture?
Firstly, as an object, there is nothing theoretically or practically of importance that the natural sciences cannot tell us. True, on a quantum level there are things that are indeterminate even theoretically, but they don't really impact the type of knowledge that art history is. But we didn't begin by discussing an 'object'. We began by discussing a statue, in this case of the Buddha.
No matter how accurate the natural sciences can describe the objects form and material composition, nothing in its properties can determine for science that the object is, in fact, a statue. 'Statue' is not a determination of an object at all, it is a determination of a thing. 'Things' always exist in and for a World of comprehension and form part of that world of context and meaning. The 'historical' part of art history deals with this statue precisely in its context and meaning as a thing, and with a rigor unknown to the simple exactness of natural science attempts to reconstruct some of that World of meaning that gave birth to the thing.
We aren't finished with the statue by examining its thingliness in the context of its world (or ours), though. It is not simply a statue, but a statue of the Buddha. History exhausts itself in its determinations of the statue as situated, contextualized thing, but we are looking at it through the methodologies of art history, not simple history. As art the statue is a Work, a work that reveals the Buddha by presenting the Buddha.
As a result of a myth that crept into simplistic art history at some point, and has been difficulty to stamp out, there is an idea that art somehow 'progresses'. Concomitant with that myth is the myth that art is by and large 'representational' in nature. It results, in the worst cases, in the notion that pictorial art was some type of primitive method of photography that 'progressed' to higher and higher realism but has now been replaced by 'real' photography and continues as some sort of 'cultural' curiosity.
In contrast to this, the statue of the Buddha does not represent, because nothing was presented formerly that could then be re-presented. It is also not symbolic, it does not function as a symbol of something that somehow exists similarly but differently elsewhere as in the semiotic signifier/signified pairing. It makes as little sense to say that the statue is not the Buddha as it does to say that the statue is the Buddha. The statue reveals the Buddha. It also makes no sense to say, well, perhaps it does for Buddhists, but not for rational westerners. Belief is not at issue in the statue, because it was not at issue in the World that the statue hails from. Belief implies the choice between belief and doubt. One can, I suppose, doubt that trees exist, but it doesn't make one a more rational westerner, it makes one of interest to psychiatrists. The same goes for the statue of the Buddha within its context.
Why did natural science have no means of looking at the meaning either of the thing as a statue, or the work as the Buddha? Natural science doesn't deal with things, or works, fundamentally it deals with objects, which is to say it doesn't deal with meaning, understanding, or truth, but with description, explanation, and correctness.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
I thought Dawkins had embarrassed himself enough ...
Quantum Fluctuations
I had thought the implosion of Dawkins "biological" theories would have been enough for this pseudo-scientific charlatan, however as the above link demonstrates, he's not above bringing in misrepresentations of physics in order to attempt to convince a public even less familiar with the notions of quantum mechanics than they are with modern evolutionary theory.
The following is my response to this latest video stream of bullshit:
I'm a bit baffled by how Dawkins and his cohort manage to conflate relativity theory with quantum mechanics, while physicists around the world have been trying for nearly a hundred years to solve the contradictions between the two. One of the main difficulties remaining for relativity theory is that as a theory that systematizes the universe as a whole, it becomes subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem, i.e. any self-consistent system implies the existence of a meta system. QM does not have this issue as it does not propose that the universe as a whole is systematic. However, let me set straight a few of the specifics proffered by this particular pseudo-scientific charlatan.
The total amount of energy in the universe we presently occupy is approximately 10^120 x 10^140 (including degrees of gravitational freedom) quanta, multiplied by the amount of energy per quantum. Sorry to dump water on your drum roll, but each quantum contains an infinite amount of energy, not zero energy. Any infinite amount of anything placed into a finite container will, of course, constantly spill over, creating a measurable, testable release of energy. This energy has indeed been measured and tested, and is known as the Casimir Effect. The University of Leicester, in particular, has proposed sending a probe into space in order to test whether the energy from the Casimir effect could be utilized.
The quantum void, as well, is not nothing, although it is certainly not a 'thing' either. The base particles of matter have no mass and are only differentiated from void by form (angle and spin). Odd isn't it that the ultimate materialism winds up, at the quantum level, being dependent on form - or to put it as Heisenberg did "Plato was right after all.". Mass comes about if/when these particles move in a certain fashion. Rather than being "space" the void could better be pictured as a seething layer of massless particles constantly being created and destroyed.
In fact the void bears a striking resemblance to some facets of Eckhart's mysticism as well as confirming Aristotle in the notion that space is illusory. Put simply, as Aristotle said "unformed matter and the void are not differentiable and therefore the same.". Eckhart's description of the godhead, originally a gnostic term, was that the godhead had no attributes that could be posited of it - i.e. no positive attributes. Eckhart's godhead, then, would also not be differentiable from the void.
Please note that I'm not proposing an intelligent universe, or a personally involved one. The crap Dawkins is displaying, though, proposes through a pile of pseudo scientific crap what is obvious to anybody sensibly familiar with dialectic - i.e. for the void to have self-identity it has to be compared to its opposite, i.e. its difference. The universe may well be the difference that provides the void with its selfsameness as void. Given that Identity and Difference underly all logic as well as all dialectic it would be hardly surprising to learn that this "law of thought" is actually a law of the universe.
Perhaps with the results of the human genome project having pulled the rug out from under Dawkins' genetic bullshit he now has to try to dazzle with his lack of knowledge of elementary physics instead. (in case you're unfamiliar with the results, genes do not translate to phenotypes in any direct manner, in fact genes function much like language, providing the nouns and verbs with which an organism can self-organize its system - linguistics has become the most relevant methodology for genetic exploration).
One thing is certain, though. It's far easier to demonstrate that Dawkins is a bigoted white upper middle class ideologue with no relation to either science or religion, than to prove or disprove the existence of something ('god') that we haven't even defined.
I had thought the implosion of Dawkins "biological" theories would have been enough for this pseudo-scientific charlatan, however as the above link demonstrates, he's not above bringing in misrepresentations of physics in order to attempt to convince a public even less familiar with the notions of quantum mechanics than they are with modern evolutionary theory.
The following is my response to this latest video stream of bullshit:
I'm a bit baffled by how Dawkins and his cohort manage to conflate relativity theory with quantum mechanics, while physicists around the world have been trying for nearly a hundred years to solve the contradictions between the two. One of the main difficulties remaining for relativity theory is that as a theory that systematizes the universe as a whole, it becomes subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem, i.e. any self-consistent system implies the existence of a meta system. QM does not have this issue as it does not propose that the universe as a whole is systematic. However, let me set straight a few of the specifics proffered by this particular pseudo-scientific charlatan.
The total amount of energy in the universe we presently occupy is approximately 10^120 x 10^140 (including degrees of gravitational freedom) quanta, multiplied by the amount of energy per quantum. Sorry to dump water on your drum roll, but each quantum contains an infinite amount of energy, not zero energy. Any infinite amount of anything placed into a finite container will, of course, constantly spill over, creating a measurable, testable release of energy. This energy has indeed been measured and tested, and is known as the Casimir Effect. The University of Leicester, in particular, has proposed sending a probe into space in order to test whether the energy from the Casimir effect could be utilized.
The quantum void, as well, is not nothing, although it is certainly not a 'thing' either. The base particles of matter have no mass and are only differentiated from void by form (angle and spin). Odd isn't it that the ultimate materialism winds up, at the quantum level, being dependent on form - or to put it as Heisenberg did "Plato was right after all.". Mass comes about if/when these particles move in a certain fashion. Rather than being "space" the void could better be pictured as a seething layer of massless particles constantly being created and destroyed.
In fact the void bears a striking resemblance to some facets of Eckhart's mysticism as well as confirming Aristotle in the notion that space is illusory. Put simply, as Aristotle said "unformed matter and the void are not differentiable and therefore the same.". Eckhart's description of the godhead, originally a gnostic term, was that the godhead had no attributes that could be posited of it - i.e. no positive attributes. Eckhart's godhead, then, would also not be differentiable from the void.
Please note that I'm not proposing an intelligent universe, or a personally involved one. The crap Dawkins is displaying, though, proposes through a pile of pseudo scientific crap what is obvious to anybody sensibly familiar with dialectic - i.e. for the void to have self-identity it has to be compared to its opposite, i.e. its difference. The universe may well be the difference that provides the void with its selfsameness as void. Given that Identity and Difference underly all logic as well as all dialectic it would be hardly surprising to learn that this "law of thought" is actually a law of the universe.
Perhaps with the results of the human genome project having pulled the rug out from under Dawkins' genetic bullshit he now has to try to dazzle with his lack of knowledge of elementary physics instead. (in case you're unfamiliar with the results, genes do not translate to phenotypes in any direct manner, in fact genes function much like language, providing the nouns and verbs with which an organism can self-organize its system - linguistics has become the most relevant methodology for genetic exploration).
One thing is certain, though. It's far easier to demonstrate that Dawkins is a bigoted white upper middle class ideologue with no relation to either science or religion, than to prove or disprove the existence of something ('god') that we haven't even defined.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Dawkins the Political Ideologue
“Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.”
Interestingly, the author of this quote, published athttp://www.toqonline.com
in their February 2010 issue was discussing Schmitt, the ideologue of Nazi biologism.
More interestingly, given the admittedly white nationalist beliefs of the author, this type of biologism is dismissed as “too right-wing, too Nazi, and too philosophically naive".
Dawkins' notion of the genome as the fundamental being, the replicator, with his concordant description of the organiam, whether bacteria or a human vehicle, as simply a vehicle to properly replicate and improve the genome, obviously fits in well with such a definition of biologism.
So we have Mr. Richard Dawkins, too right-wing, too much of a Nazi, and too philosophically naive to appeal to white supremacists.
A book in the 1980's which included contributions by Lewontin among others accused Dawkins of precisely this, as did Stephen J. Gould.
Dawkins so-called rebuttal rests on name-calling, an assumption that his readership won't understand philosophical terms and he can therefore write them off, and the final act of intellectual dishonesty in the rebuttal, in which Dawkins claims “nonsense”, referring to a sentence from the book that he only half quotes. Exactly how half a sentence is supposed to make sense is apparently a question beyond Mr. Dawkins readership. Oddly enough, the sentence is about ontological priority, one of the key concepts that relegates Dawkins' work to the crank ramblings of a politically charged ideologue.
Given Dawkins' hero status among secular humanists, it poses an interesting question: Heidegger claimed that none of the humanisms that had existed to that point "valued human dignity high enough".
Do secular humanists value human dignity lower than white supremacists?
Interestingly, the author of this quote, published at
in their February 2010 issue was discussing Schmitt, the ideologue of Nazi biologism.
More interestingly, given the admittedly white nationalist beliefs of the author, this type of biologism is dismissed as “too right-wing, too Nazi, and too philosophically naive".
Dawkins' notion of the genome as the fundamental being, the replicator, with his concordant description of the organiam, whether bacteria or a human vehicle, as simply a vehicle to properly replicate and improve the genome, obviously fits in well with such a definition of biologism.
So we have Mr. Richard Dawkins, too right-wing, too much of a Nazi, and too philosophically naive to appeal to white supremacists.
A book in the 1980's which included contributions by Lewontin among others accused Dawkins of precisely this, as did Stephen J. Gould.
Dawkins so-called rebuttal rests on name-calling, an assumption that his readership won't understand philosophical terms and he can therefore write them off, and the final act of intellectual dishonesty in the rebuttal, in which Dawkins claims “nonsense”, referring to a sentence from the book that he only half quotes. Exactly how half a sentence is supposed to make sense is apparently a question beyond Mr. Dawkins readership. Oddly enough, the sentence is about ontological priority, one of the key concepts that relegates Dawkins' work to the crank ramblings of a politically charged ideologue.
Given Dawkins' hero status among secular humanists, it poses an interesting question: Heidegger claimed that none of the humanisms that had existed to that point "valued human dignity high enough".
Do secular humanists value human dignity lower than white supremacists?
Monday, March 1, 2010
A Hermeneutical Dialectic
The study of the Invental necessarily proceeds by means of a hermeneutical dialectic. This dialectic, rather than attempting to sublate apparent contradictions, maintains them in their contradiction and utilizes the idea of a constantly self-modifying ideology to hermeneutically approach them. In this manner not only are the contradictions maintained but may be pushed further apart to discover their difference in a more profound manner.
One facet of the hermeneutic is to discover the difference between apparent contradictions. One of the basic questions is not how to sublate Identity and Difference, but to ask "what is the difference between Identity and Difference?", in that they are interdependent contradictions. In this case the difference is known in English by name of the Same.
The ability of the Self, as society, to hold and maintain both sides of the dialectic is the key to the Invental Subject's ability to come to a decision at all in a given situation, in response to a given Event.
One facet of the hermeneutic is to discover the difference between apparent contradictions. One of the basic questions is not how to sublate Identity and Difference, but to ask "what is the difference between Identity and Difference?", in that they are interdependent contradictions. In this case the difference is known in English by name of the Same.
The ability of the Self, as society, to hold and maintain both sides of the dialectic is the key to the Invental Subject's ability to come to a decision at all in a given situation, in response to a given Event.
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