:: a recall ::
In contributing to Cascadian Pragmatism as “a thing”, I frequently mention my professor (we were at Princeton U at the time) Richard Rorty. This guy was known as a kind of bridge figure when it came to analytic vs continental philosophy, to use a jargon.
The analytics were the Anglo-Scottish who fed off the Enlightenment and the rise of logic as distinct from theologic. The continentalists were referred to like that cuz they lived across the English Channel and were therefore on the continent, as in France.
Rorty read the French stuff, whereas most in his department in the USA were steeped in the analytic stuff.
A book we might mention that was topical (trending) at the time I was at Princeton (Class of 1980) was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Rorty liked it, although he complained of its length. He liked his philosophy to stay pithy, by his own standards.
In said book, the Continental might be referred to as the Romantic. Some just like to ride their motorcycles in breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, perhaps with beautiful people (by their own standards). Others wanna take their bike apart and analyze it, meaning repair it, study its guts. But we needn’t be too either / or about it. Many quality lifestyles mix these tendencies.
To get specific, the Romantics are more prone to look inward and poke around in their own subjectivity. They’re introvert psychoanalysts who moved from Freud and Jung to Lacan and Derrida.
They were happy to absorb Marxism (which derived from Hegel), but to displace the outward grand epic of the dialectic (materialistic, analytic) and replace it with the collective unconscious, however structured. That structure (the anatomy of the occult, the hidden) was something to argue about, and remains an arena of contending viewpoints to this day.
Rorty would read and interpret Derrida, a French guy, and Foucault. However he was also conversant with Wittgenstein, the Austrian Vienna Circle dude, who typified the analytic school in his early work, as a protege of Bertrand Russell’s and in the lineage of say Frege.
I had a second thesis adviser, a Brit working under or with Rorty (I considered him an apprentice of sorts) who expressed continental considerations. I’m forgetting his name at this moment. Habermas, Adorno…
Rorty thought my thesis on Wittgenstein was OK but not great. He told me he’d bumped it up (my grade) especially because of my thesis defense in his office, less so the thesis itself, which somewhat prefigured machine learning techniques in NLP, in the rear view mirror (with the benefit of hindsight).
“Word-meaning trajectories…” I don’t recall if I used that language (I was also thinking of larger chunks, whole memes, complexes, floating in semantic space, each with inertia (weight)), but it stems from Wittgenstein’s “meaning as use” pretty easily. I’d bring that stuff up with E. J. Applewhite later, in the context of pondering Fuller’s remote vocabulary.
So now, in my late sixties I’m turning my attention back to the continental stuff more, not that this is in any way a new interest, just I’ve neglected to catch up.
I was reading Freud in 8th grade and one could say my penchant for philosophy was a direct consequence of my interest in psychology, which (again in hindsight) links back to worldly affairs through what psycho-physicist Arnold Mindell termed Process Work. I was reading Lacan at Princeton, but more or less on my own vs under the tutelage of specific professional teachers. My peer group, my cohort, was full of teachers my own age, so I’m happy to count them as not yet professionals, but teachers (by my own standards) nonetheless.
My foot in the door, at School of Tomorrow, has been Mark Fisher. He continues in the lineage of Derrida by repurposing the word hauntology. He’s haunted by dreams of canceled futures, or futures past. Capitalism = Claustrophobia for him. He feels trapped in his co-opted state and yearns for a return to the idealism expressed in brutalism, the architectural form, somewhat Soviet in flavor. Some would say fascist, leading to all this confusion about accelerationism and whether it’s tilting left or right.
Also confusing might be why am I citing Brits as in the continental tradition after I just put Brits in the Anglo-analytic tradition? These shoptalks only work for awhile. They have a half life. There’s nothing all that strict about these terms, and besides, the Anglosphere has its own Romanticism, through such as Coleridge, as I take up in my Graph Theory deck (talking about my slides).
From Fisher we tune in such philosophers as Nick Land and the CCRU (a think tank of sorts), which bridges us to Curtis Yarvin and perhaps the Alt Right.
I’ve branded as Alt Left myself. In Rorty’s footsteps, I trace to the Transcendentalists, who were experimentalists in terms of wanting to put theories into practice in communities. Nick Land thinks the same way: experiment and maybe fail locally. This isn’t about imposing lifestyles from the top in a universalist world government kind of way. The various ethnospheres coexist as partially interpenetrating. Their interactions are kaleidoscopic.
As a Cascadian Pragmatist, I’m about lowering the logistical barriers to doing that (experimenting, research), much as affordable electronics have brought music and film production within reach of more studios.
You want to try something kind of like Burning Man and/or Rainbow Gathering and/or Vortex 1, but on a smaller scale and without an open-ended time commitment (you’ll do a run for five years, including clean up), and to make that work, you need dwelling machines made in China, prototyped in Cascadia (and Scandinavia and elsewhere). Thanks to design science, you make it work.
In the diagram above, we see a process wherein the collective thought process or zeitgeist is running a variable amount of free energy through its epistemic foraging circuits. Free energy used this way is more like disposable income than bankruptcy or shipwreck. Or call it basic research. Its survival value may become more apparent down the road, as, per Project Renaissance, capitalist distribution machinery (price tag oriented, catalog based, somewhat one dimensional) reaps benefits from the nonprofit guinea pig enterprises (the art colonies, the creatives).
These need not be roles into which individuals are typecast, in some either/or equation. A creative may also be a Costco shopper, meaning a consumer of commodities from inventory, from what’s standing in reserve (being Heidegger-sounding for the moment).
The planet itself is a giant nonprofit in my conception, meaning it’s flooded with grant currency from solar fusion, with human intelligence in charge of the surface circuitry, to be programmed. Picture water wheels. Picture a spherical motherboard, with energy running downhill (reflected back into space).
When we fuck it up, chips burn. Sure, some pockets may profit, even on burning motherboards, maybe from the free energy thereby released. But then again, free energy needn’t be associated with catastrophic failure, either individually or collectively. It’s an investment and it’s wise to run some through polymathic dreamwork circuitry when afforded the opportunity, per Fuller’s Education Automation. The UBI scholarships (cite Andrew Yang) pay off when stakeholders strike gold.
I’m putting polymathy and schizo-delirium on the same curvilinear spectrum to suggest this dreamwork horizon, or call it the mind-brain interface. Think of the BE phase in GST, whereas DO (praxis) and HAVE (inventory) are downstream from said visionary or prophetic states of mind. Per the Gibbsian lingo of Synergetics, both the gaseous (chaotic) and the crystalline (brittle) are eccentric by one degree (of freedom) vs-a-vs the fluidity of pure fluency, the phase sandwiched in between those two.
