Fragmenta Philosophica

Thus Spake Craddick

For anyone who's interested, note that I have replied to Bill Vallicella, regarding Nietzsche and sundry other matters.

Ecce Homines

Bill Vallicella and I are having an interesting conversation over at his excellent blog in regards to Nietzsche. I'll reply to his rejoinder over the next few days, the gods willing.

Anchorage

I secure my leisure by laboring all the livelong day as a programmer. Developers whose work, like mine, is "web-centric" (and whose isn't these days?) will inevitably work with html from time to time, no matter how  low-level  or computationally august their main duties are.

One of the terminological anomalies of html is the "anchor" - a.k.a. the "(hyper)link." Engineers, at least, still refer to them as anchors, since that's the name of the html tag which creates them - e.g., <a href="http://paulcraddick.typepad.com/fragmenta_philosophica/"> (Yep, the "a" standards for "anchor"). Since good programming practice dictates that programmatic constructs be named in a way which points to their function in an obvious manner, it's easy to see why "anchor," well, rankles.

In the wonderful O'reilly edition on HTML/XHTML, for example, the authors write,

"The nomenclature here is a bit unfortunate: the 'anchor' tag should mark just a destination, not the jumping-off point of a hyperlink, too. You 'drop anchor'; you don't jump off one. We won't even mention the atrociously confusing terminology the W3C [Ed. eminent, ahem, standards body] uses for the various parts of a hyperlink, except to say that someone got things all 'bass ackwards'."

An obscure parallel occurs to me: I have a very interesting series of musical instruction books which endeavor to show that, contrary to the apparently arbitrary tuning of the standard modern guitar (from low string to high: E-A-D-G-B-E), there actually is a hidden rationale for what seems  senseless, superficially. The same might be the case with the naming of the html anchor.

There is a kind of (nautical) anchor called a "kedge," which is used for warping. The idea is that the kedge - a light anchor - is tossed ahead; being secured, it may then be employed to pull the vessel forward. Adapting this somewhat arcane usage to the web context, one would understand the html anchor as a way to pull the browser to the distant ("anchored") destination. Of course, this is all figurative talk anyhow - one doesn't really "go" anywhere on the web, but rather brings resources to oneself. But at least the html anchor is sort of nominally "redeemed" thereby.  And, since I've never seen anyone else make the connection to a kedge - though surely someone somewhere has - I thought I'd ... throw it out there.

Wherefore "The Other"?

As time goes on, I become painfully aware of just how ill read I am, and I'm cognizant that my ignorance especially extends to "postmodernist" works in philosophy - to which I must confess I have never been attracted. Whether as cause or consequence I cannot say for sure, but one of my pet peeves is what strikes me as a postmodernist verbal tic, "The Other."

Even at its best, philosophy tends to be jargon-laden, especially in translation. We encounter such terminological infelicities as thought-thinking-itself, what-it-means-to-be-such-and-such, that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-conceived, thing-in-itself, etc. Fair enough: when terms are not ready at-hand, one could do worse than - or can do no better than - resort to awkward coinages. However, my suspicion (prejudice, if you like) is that especially with the advent of the 20th century, one sees a burgeoning of "technical" grammata out of all proportion to their needfulness (cp. Heidegger). And so we are led down the via obscura.

It's difficult to fix a reliable starting point for nearly any trend of thought, but surely Hegel - for whom I have great esteem - is to blame for the general tendency, as well as the specific matter of "the Other." It's darkly humorous that shortly before undertaking the Phenomenology, he wrote to the great translator Voss, "... I should like to say of my aspirations that I shall try to teach philosophy to speak German. Once that is accomplished, it will be infinitely more difficult to give shallowness the appearance of profound speech."

At the beginning of the (in)famous section on "Lordship and Bondage," he writes, "Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self." (Phenomenology, 179 [emphasis in original])

Marx was no Marxist; and it's no virtue to imitate Hegel in his least edifying tendencies. Whence comes this fixation on "The Other" - what purchase does the formulation afford which cannot be had with more prosaic expressions? From Foucault to Frantz Fanon, Derrida to Edward Said to radical feminists, one meets this mystifying trope again and again. As best I can tell, more often than not it functions similarly to the popular usage of "homophobia" - as a pyschologistic strategy to undermine an opponent's discourse by imputing shameful motives. If it vaguely connotes something like "xeno-phobia" (etymologically speaking), and/or the all-too-human predilection to treat other persons as means and not ends, then why not just say so? My hunch is that a rather banal notion would remain were one to "deconstruct" the term.

Of course, I may be mistaken, and would be grateful for the remedy - any defenders of the needfulness of "The Other"?

Metaphysical Frivolity

"... illness and the approach of death may draw forth the ultimate capacities from a man who has hitherto wasted his life in 'metaphysical frivolity' and let his own potentialities lie fallow." (Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p. 115)

I think that locution - "metaphysical frivolity" - beautifully expresses the existential waste entailed in allowing the gulf to remain wide between one's empirical self and one's ideal self - or even in being blind to one's ideal self (daimon) altogether.

Summoning the shade of old Friedrich, I must say that I find it irksome that so many of the objects of traditionalist condemnation are considered "evil," when actually the appropriate term is "contemptible."

Excuses, Excuses ...

In what is becoming a lamentable pattern, I'm remiss in my blogging "duties" once again.

I've just started a new job as a consultant, so I'm acclimatizing to the usual systemic shock which accompanies a new foray into wage-slavery. Aside from thanking my lucky stars at being gainfully employed again, I'm grateful to have the morning and evening commute time to read, as I grab the monorail into and out of San Francisco. 

On the way there, it's The Doctor and the Soul by Viktor Frankl, an enduring favorite; on the way back home it's Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver - two vastly different volumes which are united in breathing (or perhaps radiating) wisdom. So many thoughts bubbling over about each - and in relation to one another; an interesting essay it would indeed be to give a close reading of both "synoptically," as Mortimer Adler used to say.

But, alas, that'll have to wait - I'm in Regular Expression- and Xml-Hell at the moment.