Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Pluralism and Multiculturalism


I can't accept an America which is monolithic or imperial, no matter how pacific, affluent, or secure such an America might be.

A place where men and women of all ages and races and cultures and creeds might thrive without any sacrifice of individuality -- that's the America of which I dream, and I believe that's the America dreamt.

A place where individuals might thrive -- but without any fuzziness of thinking and feeling required to make this fitting together in a place possible -- for I do not believe that such fuzziness of thinking and feeling is a manifestation of thriving -- I believe that fuzziness to be a symptom of the very opposite.


I fear that we have not yet succeeded in creating a pluralism, a multiculturalism, which is not a fuzziness of thinking and feeling. We have not created a pluralism or a multiculturalism which fully thrives, or thrives without a debilitating and counterbalancing sacrifice of some sort which we find difficult to examine and rigorously problematicize.

" E pluribus unum..."

The parts make a terrible sacrifice to become a unity; but without unity, the parts will never thrive. Are the sacrifices for the greater thriving of those parts, or a " desiring of one's own repression"?

I don't think we know, but surely it is within our power to examine the nature of this sacrifice we make, to scrutinize the limitations it imposes upon us... which we impose upon ourselves. To whom or what is this sacrifice currently directed? Can the sacrifice be directed to ourselves, to our own thriving? Is there such a thing as an 'immanent' sacrifice?

To just what extent is the materialism of Marx a materialism, and to just what extent does it retain idealism? Does Marxism exhibit any utilization of the concept(s) of multiplicity? Could it be that the thinking of multiplicit(ies) is crucial to any accurate materialism, and that the key feature of idealism is its crushing of the power to think multiplicit(ies)?

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Pluralism as Critique of Totality

What has me perplexed and fascinated at this point in the conversation is how to connect James and Wittgenstein (also Adorno) with "the Enlightenment." Part of the trick, I now think, is to see how the critique of "absolutism" and "intellectualism" in James is a critique of totality that belongs to a conversation shared with Wittgenstein, with Foucault, and even with Adorno.

Note: Adorno is a difficult case because one of the voices in his texts is a nostalgiac longing for a a lost totality and a utopian yearning for a totality-to-come. Deleuze is also a difficult case because, like Foucault, Derrida, and Wittgenstein, he demands a ruthless critique of totality, but unlike them -- and in this respect he is in the same camp as James and Bergson -- Deleuze thinks that a critique of totality is possible by way of an ontology of difference. Whereas his comrades-in-arms of la pensee 68, like Wittgenstein and Adorno, think that a critique of totality is only possible by stringently adjuring from ontology, that ontology is only possible as totality. Here too Levinas would concur, and Levinas' influence on Derrida can scarcely be overestimated.

The critique of totality belongs to the Enlightenment, and it can be difficult to see this clearly, because it is not sufficiently well-appreciated how much of the Enlightenment itself was a protest against totality, against intellectualism, and against absolutism. And this had an immediate political significance, because in protesting against these "sins against thought," the Enlightenment philosophers were directly attacking those whose legitimation was based on those sins -- the authority of the aristocracy and the clergy. When Smith argues against mercantilism, he is argung against the totality that speaks in the name of the king. When Hume argues against the existence of miracles, or demolishes the argument from design (or at least one version of it), he is attacking the basis of the self-understanding of the clergy.

And this way of looking at things may help get into better focus the difference between James, whose pluralism took on a political voice in the first half of the twentieth century (partly as mediated through Dewey), and Goodman, whose pluralism has thus far remained an academic exercise.

Monday, December 18, 2006

The Matter of Truth, the Matter of Matter: Which Matters More? Part X

I have complained that Nelson Goodman’s brief mention of William James in the beginning of “Ways of Worldmaking”, (WoWM), frames the thinking of William James in a way which is misleading and harmful. However, I have begun to feel a pang of conscience about the way I in turn have framed the thinking of Nelson Goodman, focusing as I have on only a paragraph or two of WoWM found at the beginning of the book.

In order to broaden and correct my presentation, I want to include this stronger, more witty, more characteristic, and more meaty Goodman excerpt, from chapter six of WoWM:



“To speak of worlds as made by versions often offends both by its implicit pluralism and by its sabotage of what I have called ‘something stolid underneath’. Let me offer what comfort I can. While I stress the multiplicity of right world-versions, I by no means insist that there are many worlds—or indeed any; for as I have already suggested, the question whether two versions are of the same world has as many good answers as there are good interpretations of the words “versions of the same world.” The monist can always contend that two versions need only be right to be accounted versions of the same world. The pluralist can always reply by asking what the world is like apart from all versions. Perhaps the best answer is that given by Professor Woody Allen when he writes:

‘Can we actually ‘know’ the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown. The point, however, is: Is there anything out there? And why? And must they be so noisy? Finally, there can be no doubt that the one characteristic of ‘reality’ is that it lacks essence. That is not to say it has no essence, but merely lacks it. ( The reality I speak of here is the same one Hobbes described, but a little smaller.)’

The message, I take it, is simply this: never mind mind, essence is not essential, and matter doesn’t matter. We do better to focus on versions rather than worlds. Of course, we want to distinguish between versions that do and those that do not refer, and to talk about the things and worlds, if any referred to; but these things and worlds and even the stuff they are made of—matter, anti-matter, mind, energy, or whatnot—are themselves fashioned by and along with the versions. Facts, as Norwood Hanson says, are theory-laden; they are as theory-laden as we hope our theories are fact-laden. Or in other words, facts are small theories, and true theories are big facts.”

(Nelson Good quote from page 96 of WoWM; Woody Allen quote-within-quote from “My Philosophy” in Getting Even (1966); Norwood Hanson from Patterns of Discovery (1958).)

With this quotation, I hope to have dispelled the impression I may previously have created that Nelson Goodman’s thinking is absolutist or essentialist; I hopefully have also destroyed any ability I might have had to use Goodman as a straw man.

I still will use him as a stalking horse.

What is this idea from Goodman’s gloss (above) of Professor Woody Allen that “matter doesn’t matter?” Not at all what I take from Professor Allen’s teaching…. Why and how do our ‘takes’ diverge on this most critical point?

On the matter of “worldmaking” and whether matter matters, I was reminded of this:


“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” - Karl Marx


I claim that Nelson Goodman’s book is not in contradiction to this single statement from Marx, that it addresses the same issue, and with an approach which seems similar, too. And yet Goodman’s book is of another world - it is different, and this difference matters - I cannot be indifferent to this difference.

Goodman says this:


“ Worldmaking sometimes, without adding or dropping entities, alters emphasis; and a difference between two versions that consists primarily or even solely in their relative weighting of the same entities may be striking and consequential.” ( WoWM, page 101.)

In other words, “propensitites to emphasize differently” ( William James), are REAL differences; there can be no appeal to “ same essential interests”(also William James) to mask these REAL differences, to make these “ propensitites to emphasize differently,” trivial or inessential.

Therefore, even though at times I appear to be quarrelling with Nelson Goodman over mere matters of emphasis, these aren’t mere – in this matter, these matters do matter.



Saturday, December 16, 2006

The Matter of Truth, the Matter of Matter: Which Matters More? Part IX

In response to this quotation from Nelson Goodman’s “Ways of Worldmaking”:




“As intimated by William James’s equivocal title ‘A Pluralistic Universe,’ the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis. If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking.”

Dr. Spinoza made this comment:




“[….] notice the curious tension in the title -- whatever there is, is pluralistic (there are many of them? many ways of seeing them? what?) -- but it is also a universe -- a single entity.”

We may naively think that there must by needs be some one single entity which contains all space, and all of the objects of space, and that this single entity is the universe.

This makes sense to us, I think, based on some very provincial analogical thinking.

I recognize that Dr. Spinoza probably didn’t put a great deal of thought into the wording of his reaction to Goodman’s statement, and he may be unhappy to see me make such ado about it, but I think that Dr. Spinoza's statement accurately caught what Nelson Goodman was trying to project… (and I also think that Nelson Goodman catches an idea of the universe which is a very common one -- the thing which made me angry is that Goodman has attached that common idea onto William James when James explicitly doesn’t hold that common idea, and challenges it in an extraordinarily straightforward and clear way.)

So, what can be said about the universe as a single entity, and what can be said about this 'tension'?

An entity is a body, a unit, a thing, an article.

I have bestirred myself to look up the word ENTITY in the Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary I have handy:




1 a: BEING, EXISTENCE, esp: independent, separate, or self-contained existence b : the existence of a thing as contrasted with its attributes 2 : something that has separate and distinct existence and objective or conceptual reality.”


I am fascinated to see that, according to this dictionary, the derivation is from the Latin “ens” existing thing, of esse to be

Now that I have given this dictionary definition to you, I need to stop for a moment in order to make a note of caution.

In giving you a dictionary definition, I am working in a way which I almost always avoid. Looking at this particular definition, it seems that if there were ever a place to avoid using dictionary definitions, it has got to be here, where every word is a philosophical quagmire.

I note the quagmire, and yet I'll walk right into it.

I will draw on these definitions, because in their danger, their philosophical danger, they will help us assess the philosophical danger we have lived with unconsciously and thoughtlessly for hundreds of generations, believing in our thoughtless way that we are secure and sensible, when we are not.

We really do seem to think that the universe is, if anything is, an independent, separate, and self-contained existence.

It is, we seem to think, the self-contained existence which contains all of the other self-contained existences.

As the self-contained existence which contains all of the other self-contained existence, it is the "absolute entity."

This conception of the universe is an absolutist conception.

Absolutist conceptions are conceptions which set up or rely upon an idea of one independent reality. They are not accurate conceptions or the only conceivable conceptions, or conceptions we must by necessity hold, or conceptions which experiences compel us to accept, or anything of the sort. We just treat them as if they had these qualities: of accuracy,necessity, compulsion, authority. ( I want to show later - I'll do it very soon- that no contemporary cosmologist or topologist or physicist holds the absolutist conception of the universe.) We 'think' we MUST treat them this way… why? Just where the heck do these 'absolutist' conceptions come from, and why?

When Nelson Goodman says this:



“If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking.”

He may at first appear to be giving due to a pluralistic account, but I will be arguing that he is not – that this has nothing to do with developing a pluralistic thinking.

In this quotation from Goodman, I note the tension which Dr. Spinoza's comment has drawn attention to… That tension is there, but as part of the disease state which this kind of philosophy induces.

It’s not a tension which can propel us outward and away – It is just an enervating tension to make our time in the fly bottle even more miserable than it already was. Our fly bottle is a universe conceived as a self-contained existence, (even if that self-contained existence could be called a collection of diversity.)

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Matter of Truth, the Matter of Matter: Which Matters More? Part VIII

In the last post, I quoted Nelson Goodman ( from Ways of Worldmaking):

“As intimated by William James’s equivocal title ‘A Pluralistic Universe,’ the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis. If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking.”

If it turns out that the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis, then it will be “game over” for what I wish to accomplish by geological smashmouth-- by creating a mapping of forces in order to examine certain break-flows present in a field [SxIyNzThome(0,1,0)], and to determine how to tap into productive fecundities which become released when these break-flows are pushed around by yet other flows which I think can be mobilized.

First of all, I don’t think that “monism” and “pluralism” are names for different ideologies.

“Monisms” and “pluralisms” are both multiplicities. ( Please note that in establishing this commonality between monism(s) and pluralism(s) I am not making any movement in the direction of evaporating the issues between them. I am not saying anything in any way resembling the idea that, “If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking.” This remains a disastrous way of looking at this, I think.)

Monism(s) and pluralism(s) are very different types of multiplicity. They organize to create very different kinds of becomings. They interact with each other in ways that I don’t think we’ve had the conceptual apparatus to appreciate or contemplate very effectively so far, (but I am very ignorant of much of the available conceptual apparatus ( apparati?) and I welcome contributions to my reading lists.)

I have said that “monism” and “pluralism” are not naming ideologies. What they are naming are matters, and what I am trying to propound is a materialism. The problem is that it takes a long time to get to the point where I really am being a materialist, where saying that this is a materialism is anything but an empty gesture. I will get there, though.

In the last post, I quoted William James in what I thought Nelson Goodman might have been thinking about when he referenced William James, above.

James said ( in A Pluralistic Universe):

“Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be only propensities to emphasize differently. [Etc]”

I can understand why Nelson Goodman would offer this, and other statements James makes, in order to defend his reading of James that “the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis.” The issue between monism and pluralism would evaporate if there were some sort of basic underlying agreement upon what is essential between subjective parties who simply have propensities to emphasize differently.

I love William James, and I bet that if I had been an American of his social status and class, and basic faith in the future, I would have wanted to make this claim: “all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests.” Unfortunately, I am an American of another time, status, and class, and I have no faith whatsoever in this idea that all parties have the same essential interests – the parties are transected and sliced and diced and practically vivisected by differing forces, material forces, which push them into vicious opposition, and the opposition doesn’t go away no matter what anyone ‘thinks.’ (Whatever ones’ subjective positionings, no matter how beautiful, compassionate, inclusive, tolerant, or well-intentioned.)

This little bit from James is actually one of his rare lapses into monistic thinking, I claim. I claim that his thrusts away from defining any “same essential interests” for humanity could hardly be more courageous and thorough-going, and I hate to see him characterized by his rare lapse.

I want to use Nelson Goodman-- I even want to use his terminology. I want to make it clear, however, that the largest purpose I want him to serve is to show HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Nelson Goodman is a fly-bottle baiter, if I ever saw one.

William James is a fly-bottle breaker, if I ever saw one.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

The Matter of Truth, the Matter of Matter: Which Matters More? Part VII

On one of the opening pages of WAYS of WORLDMAKING, Nelson Goodman says:

“As intimated by William James’s equivocal title ‘A Pluralistic Universe,’ the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis. If there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking.”

Even though these comments are later qualified and elaborated upon much more extensively by Goodman, (in chapter 7 of WoWM), I think they are entirely misleading and represent an almost vicious misreading of the relationship between monism and pluralism in William James.

James presents monism as being in a poisonous, and parasitical, relationship with pluralism. Monism, in James, isn’t neutral to pluralism, and the difference between monism and pluralism doesn’t “evaporate under analysis.”

James makes a very strong association between pluralism and humanism-- and a very strong association between monism and totalitarianism ( in his critique of Hegel’s method, in ‘A Pluralistic Universe,’ though I am stretching things just a bit here because James doesn’t use the word “totalitarianism”…but that’s the concept he’s making a reference to, I believe.)

A pluralistic view, or ‘take’, of reality, is going to be able to find a place for a monistic view, or ‘take’, of reality; it can’t exclude monism without exhibiting internal contradiction.

(Is Nelson Goodman the author of “‘takes’ on reality”, as an expression, as a cliché ? I think he is. If so, then good for him-- good for that man.)

Monism doesn’t return the favor, however. That it doesn’t --this is important.

I think that Nelson Goodman’s reading of William James’s thought ( which I have termed a vicious misreading,) receives textual support from the following comments by James:

(These comments come first, and I must quote them in order for the second comments, which are the important ones, and the ones I wish to call attention to, to make sense:)

1. “What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. […] All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.

Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world’s details, takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that originally interfered.”*

Leading to this, the text which may be what Nelson Goodman was thinking of when he made the first quote, ( caustically and “ruthlessly” criticized by me,) above:

2. “ Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be only propensities to emphasize differently. Or one man may care for finality and security more than the other. Or their tastes in language may be different. One may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted characterization. To another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical. One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another a technical or professorial one.”*

As this is becoming long, and is uncharacteristically ( for me) weighted with quotation, I will now truncate, and cut to the chase, ( or the ‘take’):

The crucial concepts of Deleuze and Guattari intervene on the relationship of the monistic to the pluralistic.

* Quotes are from William James, “A Pluralistic Universe.”