5.18.2008

ear candy

I've spent time and money--a relatively large amount of my budget, although small in absolute terms--on upgrading and improving my home audio system. I'd love to upgrade to a professional A/V receiver, but that's a bit out of my league right now. Instead, I've extended the upstairs bookshelf stereo into the bedroom. It sits next to my desk and is used for the computer audio. Along with Awaken, I can now use my computer as an alarm clock, a sleep timer, and a general stereo. With Airfoil we can watch movies in bed on the laptop while enjoying better than the laptop speakers for sound.

All in all, this is a nice and cheap improvement. However, I just don't understand why we don't see more convergence in modern appliances. I use an Apple iBook and hope to soon upgrade to a desktop Mac. New speakers require me to run wire along the carpet of our rented townhouse -- my fiance will only allow so much of this. At the same time, Apple has a great third party developer base: I find the quality much higher than with PC programs (but that's just me). Why can't I get some hardware, closely tied in with Mac, that extends the functionality of programs like Awaken? I don't need a large stereo in the bedroom, but I would like decent speakers, audio streamed from my iTunes library, and the ease and functionality of my computer interface. A small clock radio with WiFi could jump on my wireless network, be controlled through a smart, well-built program like Awaken, and stream media from my music library! The best of all worlds. I would pay for a lot for this.

5.11.2008

extortions

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Of all the teams, please... please beat Pittsburgh. I can't say why I harbor such animosity in my Bucks County heart, but I do. And stupid old, fancy hair-wearing Penguins can get stuffed. That is all.

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5.05.2008

Finals

Well its one week till finals, I have a Micro Economics exam and a Spanish Exam...My writing class is only a 4 page paper comparing "Death of a salesman" to the American Dream, which should be really easy...The only one I'm concerned about is Spanish cause I don't know much of spanish and that makes taking tests pretty hard.

On another note my lacrosse team won our region championship, which is my first championship ever, and now mother's day weekend we go to new york for a national final 4 tournament.  We have the potential to win it all which would be awesome but even if we don't we get tons of free stuff like steak and lobster I've heard.  I'm pretty excited.

4.30.2008

posting may be lite

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4.29.2008

Universal History

“Nature gave man reason, and the freedom of will based upon reason, and this in itself was a clear indication of nature’s intention as regards his endowment.” - Kant

(Part 1)
(Part 2)

Morally, Kant assumed that all 'rational beings' could recognize and follow moral truths, while at the same time banishing all empirical considerations from moral decisions.  Only acts motived by duty could be considered moral.  Duty connoted the rational recognition of the moral law -- Kant's "categorical imperative" -- which was universal.   But while Kant banished all pragmatic considerations from the phenomenological world of moral reason, he could not accomplish the same for all practical reason (of which moral reason is part).  In stripping all empirical concerns from moral decisions, Kant risked leaving human life impoverished and meaningless.  His answer was a (regulative) idea of progress in history, which ensured that our actions were ultimately meaningful.

Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will's manifestations in the world of phenomena, i.e. human actions, are determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event.  History is concerned with giving an account of these phenomena, no matter how deeply concealed their causes may be, and it allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions.

Though actions are individually free and uncoordinated, Kant thought that "on a large scale" human action was intelligible, directed, and progressive:  we are collectively directed towards a single goal and we can perceive this goal from our situated consciousness.  "Individual men and even entire nations little imagine that, while they are pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in opposition to others, they are unwittingly guided in their advance along a course intended by nature."

Where Kant refered to "nature," he meant the knowledge of neumenal essence of humanity that his first critique placed out of bounds.  If his epistemology, which grounds all his work, is not to be contravened, his 'universal' history must have the status of conjecture.  Though provisional, the essay enacted a remarkable series of equivalences which aimed to close the gap between individual freedom, Reason (as philosophical explanation), and History (as world peace).  Teleology refered to the unfolding of an internal order and the actualization of potential.  Nature provided humanity with teleology by endowing it with Reason; the full development of this Reason required world peace.  Kant expected the establishment of peaceful relations between nation-states governed by international law.  The essay is marked by a sense of closure:  history is single, purposeful and ubiquitous, sweeping us into a future of moral maturity we may neither anticipate nor wish.  This optimism was grounded, as with all his conclusions, in the universal structure of moral and cognitive reason.  A kantian politics tends towards difference-effacing concensus; a foucaultian politics tends towards fragmentation of common space.

For political theorists, the focus is on the political concequences of conceptions of similarity and difference.  Kant's universal history collapses all difference, political and metaphysical, into a meta-historical theory of purposeful history.  Implicit in the very idea of a “universal” history with a practical intent is the belief that everyone can find meaning in that history, and thus motives for action. Kant did not dismiss the possibility of personal history, if only because he was silent on that subject, he was concerned with providing us with a common project towards which to direct our actions. Written from the perspective of a Prussian pietist, it was no doubt his history, meaningful to him, and its practical significance follows only to the extent that its subjective origins may be transcended into an objectively meaningful story. That is, it is relevent only insofar as the rest of humanity finds themselves in this “universal” history.
To Kant, law and morality were normative, i.e. action-guiding, systems. His theory was further influenced by the assumption that all normative systems were based in the same set of principles grounded in transcendental idealism. Legal and moral norms were isometric and isomorphic. Kant dissolved sociology, which historically had not differenciated itself as an independent science, into philosophy – rendering all questions about human action into philosophical and metaphysical terms. Modern science has for the most part reversed the order, preferring to read philosophical and moral norms as expressions of socialization and material self-interest.

In his commentary on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?, Foucault characterizes modernity as a kind of self-critical ethos directed against meta-narratives that posit universality. Behind such stories are precisely self-interested, subjective perspectives. He glosses a modern version of critique: “In what is given to us as a universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” The objects of this critique are the normative systems that direct human action: “…the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things…and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems…" Thematically this articulation is in keeping with the critique of power sedimented in history as a determinant of action, the myriad of ways in which patterns of thought (and action) are thereby disciplined and normalized.

Kant’s moral and philosophical discussion of norms leaves the lingering suspicion that freedom has been evacated (or at least controled) in precisely the place that Kant’s theoretical philosophy promised to find it (the phenomenological world). Recalling J.M. Bernstein's book on Habermas, perhaps its appropriate to say that Kant is interested in justification, Foucault in meaning. Such "meaning" can be found in a project of self-creation presumably.

4.28.2008

Defining Enlightenment

I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation--one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject--is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread which may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements but, rather, the permanent reactivation of an attitude--that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.

Foucault, "What is Enlightenment."

Foucault (2)

(Part 1)

The puzzle deepens: Habermas stands for perhaps the most prevalent form of contemporary Kantianism. It is a position that embraces moral reasoning as the basis for political institutions; political justice is a matter of correctly reasoning through a variety of relevant considerations. Political struggle, agonistic politics, or social movements may contest the prevailing political consensus, but, regardless, a true Kantian claims that such empirical events are secondary to legitimate political institutions and practices. If Foucault is faithful to Kant, it is in a quite different way then Habermas. And, when we are reminded of Foucault's lifelong attachment to Nietzsche, the distance between Kant and Foucault seems to grow.

There are several ways in which I might provisionally close this gap. (1) Kant's own critical turn meant to "limit reason." Thus, while the subsequent intellectual history is one of ever more elaborate attempts to ground Reason, there are good reasons to think Kant himself never believed this was necessary. And, if his first critique results in a priori conditions of perception, it is also true that the animating impulse behind the work is one of skepticism towards the power and scope of reason. (2) Kant provided through his transcendental idealism a universal structure to cognition. But it is true that the "identity" of the subject, if by this we mean consistant self-representation over time, is reduced by Kant to a shadow of our everyday experience. Who I am, means within the transcendental proof, simply the "I" that accompanies all my representations. If this can be seen as a radical deconstruction of personal identity, at least on a "transcendental level" (putting aside whatever that might mean) it may open the space for a geneological critique of subjects rather than closing that space. At least, it is a hermeneutic avenue worth exploring. (3) Finally, Frederick Beiser suggests that there are two potentially conflicting tendencies that emerge in the 'Enlightenment': reason as a faculty of critcism; and, reason as power of explanation. These are in conflict, he claims, and it is Kant that enacts a necessary, but doomed, salvage operation. Kant inaugurates a certain kind of critical inquiry that directs reason against itself, rendering the accumulation of knowledge and practices problematic.

[Switching voices for the moment, I am skeptical that anything I've written so far is adequate to explain in a satisfactory way, what Foucault means by calling himself "critical." There is surely a rhetorical ploy going on here: Foucault claiming the legacy of Enlightenment's canonical thinker may be nothing more than a cooption of Kant's power, his authority. Speaking of the text "What is Enlightenment?" (Foucault's not Kant's here), it seems willfully digressive; that is, working around Kant's text without engaging it. Enlightenment and Critique become, in this reading, not traditions but "attitudes" associated with modernity. Baudelaire--a figure I hope to say more about later--becomes the exemplar of this critical attitude. The choice is all the more odd when Foucault's Baudelaire is read against Walter Benjamin's Baudelaire (the poet himself must have contained multitudes, like Emerson).]

[To even suggest an answer to the question: "what did Foucault mean by 'critical'?" seems to miss the point of Foucault's more radical meditations on the nature of human identity. Letting the text speak for itself, instead of uncovering the intent of the author, is even more difficult given its composition: an assemblage of observations and judgments that have only a tenuous relationship with the occasion for their recording. To understand "Foucault" in relation to "Kant" would seem to require several disparate texts, juxtaposed and compared, with each passage illuminating and commenting on another. In the end, a commentary on Foucault's commentary on Kant must restrict itself to understanding, to whatever extent possible, what Foucault meant, rather than embarking on the herculean task of recreating a properly "critical" Kant out of Foucault's intimations. Rather, it may be that the very lack of a systematic engagement of Kant by Foucault is the most telling characteristic of their relationship.]