Conversely, is the material world just a figment of our imaginations? Just some overblown fantasy from meagre stimuli not correlated to any external reality? Then why can’t we fictionalize just as we please? Interpretation seems capable of the most outrageous silliness, but shall every last thing come from interpretation? And if it does, is it all false?

Questions without answers if there ever were any. But i’ll try to show that the paradoxical nature of this questions stem from a very real practice, and that maybe we should offer ethical answers to epistemic problems.

From this one basic dilemma rises a host of dichotomies that plague our understanding.

Phrased as body|mind (or worse, matter|spirit) this sounds dated. Nobody today cares about spirits anyway.

Other ways to put it sound more modern and yet less important. Take theory|practice: they don’t seem to be “dilemmas”, just descriptions of the way things are. Even when you’re trying to figure out “more useful theories” or fighting “dumbed down practices”, which essentially are middle-ground between the two, it seems just pointless to wonder whether things could be neither.

Or take Free-Will against Determinism. We learn nothing new when we say someone’s behaviour was deterministic, we just throw an explanation on top of it. In other words we can interpret actions as either deterministic or free-willed, but we can’t measure the freedom of the will. Even when the difference matters (like on a trial where a culprit is only punishable if acting of his own free will) all we can do is lay down the results of each case and pick the course of action we like best, based on nothing but our taste for the consequences and not the quality of the actions themselves.

Now BODY|MIND and Determinism|Free-Will, while they are both very old dualisms, are not obviously alike. We could for example invert the relation and take freedom as a property of bodies, and determinism as mostly a matter of mind-borne laws and equations that can’t be denied. Even then, there seems to be some essential similarity about the issues raised, about the kind of tension these oppositions bring to the foreground: It is always a kind of lightness against weight, a contrast between something independent but lacking power to act (THE MIND) and something subjected to inertia but that can be present (THE BODY). From this perspective, Free-Will|Determinism (and the other dualisms) tries to solve the opposition, to discover some middle-ground, but instead fails, circling around that supposed centre but never shortening the distance.

What we get, then, is confusion. Take Materialism|Idealism, a central theme for most of the political disputes of the beginning of the 20th century. Materialism, while clearly aligned to the BODY, expects from «body» that it would work as the fundamental explanation, turning it into an idea and thus both over-rating and isolating concrete people’s bodies, which end up mauled by the millions under Stalin. And Idealism goes the exactly opposite way and centralizes MIND exactly to restrict the ways of thought to those reinforced by the material apparatus of big-science.

This ambiguity, where both sides are right but the middle ground is hard, carries on to the very lives lived in the context of these problems, often manifesting itself in subtle ways.

So, for example, the importance given to ideas inside the context of Materialism|Idealism ends up motivating a difference in payment for physical and intellectual labour. This difference is a sensitive point in present geopolitics. We talk about inflation, about unionising, about unemployment rates, about GDP, about the right to strike — and never question why two very similar human beings should have such antagonistic roles in society. In fact, most of the time we can’t even acknowledge that we are treating body and mind as opposites, because this reflects a philosophical debate we not even acknowledge. And, maybe exactly because we can’t see it, there is never a clear solution, no course of action that can please everyone involved — sometimes meaning all the world. Case in point, the devaluation of physical labour is a problem, but one that we can’t solve by devaluing intellectual work. If we were to “solve” this “problem” we would have to twist very deep basic patterns of our society, likely causing more trouble than when we started.

When we question the relation of these with life, when we try to translate the question into processes or behaviours, it turns out the picture becomes both harder to grasp and more pressing.

Maybe sharing this concern over process, a fat chunk of contemporary social-thought tries to find out whether human beings are, in their essences, egotistical or altruistic:

• If we could prove that our basic gear is egotism then we could invest our energies into homo economicus models, and organize society acording to laises-faire Markethink.
• If on the other hand we proved altruism to be essential, we’d go with human rights and charity as the building blocks of a better community.

While the two ideas are being debated in Academia as propositions, they are also field lines splitting right and left wings, and as such they basically organize political tension in most of the Eastern world.

• Market people have chosen to believe (likely before any analysis) that the basic selfishness of the mob requires disciplining through the harsh laws of profit-motive and oligarchy. Of course they feel the rich will always do charity, but that does not seem central to their worldview.
• Social movement people have chosen to believe (likely before any analysis) that the basic moral impulse of the people should be the only concern of politics disregarding feasibility or context. Of course they feel the groups will develop their own economic means, but that does not seem central to their worldview.

In extreme cases human beings are both ridiculously selfish and dangerously selfless, but finding one (of several possible) intermediate proposition between left and right does not lead to doing things in new ways. Positions taken a priori will of course not be bargained, and modes of behaviour remain the same, even at the times each of the parties feel a deep longing for the other. Joining Left and Right could be akin to unite humanity, but it seems the division itself is what matters, not the themes they fight about.

And yet, in a way, here is a proposal of doing exactly this impossible thing: Exploring something like a middle-ground. More to the point, i’m putting forward an explanation of why this middle-ground is so difficult.

Part of the explanation is the similarity of these various impossible reconciliations: Left|Right, egotism|altruism, mind|body, private|public. They all involve the imposition of one worldview upon others, the appliance of ideas or laws or values upon someone’s life. In this regard technique and preaching stand very close to each other, as do Science|Faith.

The impossible dualities can then be traced to Desire|Discipline.

But now we see, instead of two qualities, one mode of action. It is not that reality has two sides, but human deeds create tension between two ways of dealing with this reality: Discipline itself is the practice of the leader, who will impose higher standards upon his own body, impose upon himself strife and endurance.

Discipline makes sense as suppression of something, a Desire that never existed alone by itself, independent, distilled — and thus a desire that becomes both more controlled and more powerful because of Discipline. This is how discipline is a devaluation of the body.

Devaluation of the body was at first a mark of distinction. The body was the most important thing for slaves, but it would seem a full Greek citizen would leave behind more than his body: His speeches, his vote, his bravery, his philosophy. Of course the ancient Greeks themselves wouldn’t put things in these terms. But it seems there is some kernel of Greek culture that we still reproduce centuries latter, even while we’ve given up most of their customs. More to the point, the unsolvable distinctions in our culture can also be seen as distinctions between kinds of citizen, between kinds of human being.

(And we can ask ourselves what exactly was so harsh about the Greek form of slavery that could generate this ontological approach. Plenty of ancient (and modern) societies have used slaves, some even treating slaves with respect. The Greeks actually had nothing against for example having slaves as teachers and scholars. So: What is special about Greek society that displaced the citizen VS slave dichotomy into their (and ours) very cosmovision?)

I would venture, expanding upon Graeber’s work, that the Greek prejudice against body is a way to build a public person out of private persons. The opposition of Master and Slave, instead of diminishing the slave in favour of the master, actually diminishes both persons in order to create a third, abstract, generalized, public person. The idea of MIND (which in the present context is much broader than the original Greek rhetorical argument) is not opposed to BODY, nor to the concrete real body, but instead is a groupified version of it. It substitutes a strong arm for an array of arms, a Man for a Mob. And still it is more than a mob. The idea of MIND, more than a simple idea, is a social practice that tries to focus the power of many bodies into one person. That is why this person is seen as both free and real. That is why it is an impossible goal which we can’t stop following.

Even then, we can re-contextualise this as modes of action. The questions are unanswerable because they reproduce an impossible exercise. But focusing on the exertion itself we can act differently. This ceases being a proposition and starts being a way to live. The philosophy turns into ethics.

Deep down, the ethical solution for this philosophical problem is to behave as the society we want to be. Just like that. It is to create modes of being not only different than this Greek heritage, but better than it. This fundamental creativity is like dreaming in public.

What that means, i hope, each one might act out for himself.

In fact, we try to go to a third world, a third point beyond the dichotomy, and it becomes an impossible goal which we can’t stop following.

This third shade, this World-3, is not less direct than World-1, nor less real, it is just different. But contrary to World-1, you can never tackle it quantitatively. It is never possible to brute-force World-3, neither with muscle, nor money, nor spam. Thus, BODY-through-MIND is always difficult.

Inside this game, BODY has a monopoly over presence, though it is the game itself that precludes presence to MIND. Maybe this is the essence of the game. But it is exactly BY doing so that the game creates the different kind of presence in World-3. This presence, which is both Presence of the Name for Judaism and Actualized Revolution for Marx, is exactly the impossible goal we can’t stop following: Not 1-Presence, but 3-Presencifying.

Endless self-proclaimed “Back-to-the-Real” movements (the passion for Romanticism, the purposeful getting lost of Post-Modernism, the blind trance of charismatic churches, the Darwin-worship of Militant Atheism, the citation-count obsession of late Academia, the show-me-the-money attitude of Markethink™, the simple-truth of transhumanism), these returns, as they try to switch the direction World-1 ← World-2, and since they can’t, inevitable get trapped in World-2. Deprived of first presence, denying third presencifying, they get lost into deaf debate. Using cosmovision as their tool, they get numb to the deformations this tool causes in their hands. Confirmation bias never ever reveals the vast similarities they share with their enemies (and self-proclaimed returns never lack an enemy).

Reaching for an (impossible) third shade of the world through an (immaterial) shade is the very essence of the BODY|MIND dilemma. It is eerily ingrained in today’s societies. In the left and right which always end up resembling each other. In charismatic religion that wants to free people using dogma. In the many wars to end war. In the consumption that makes people hungry.

More than simple historical troubles, i say it is this conflicted dualism that creates modern angst, the generalized feeling of powerlessness. I contend it is not a lack of means or rights that afflicts us, but the essential impossibility of our desirabilities (as opposed to desires).

We can never see that our goal is impossible, because World-3 must be a return to World-1 but it also must be completely dissociated from the body. There must remain no physical, bodily, personal trace in TRUTH, but nevertheless truth must be equal to body, the ideas must contain the same we are supposed to be living. The distilling of body should, exactly when embodiment is totally averted, produce body again, in a kind of transcendental circle. That is exactly what Derrida calls “Presence” with the big P. And that is also exactly why Popperians are completely unable to accept relativism, since they feel (while they don’t know it) that embracing contingency is akin to letting go of everything they hold most sacred. Thus they hold too tight. And thus the 3 world fairy tale is impossible to shake!

And that is why designers are such shallow, vain, pompous pricks! Because humans must compete with humans. More precisely, design work can only gain leverage when it is easy to subvert into human to human competition.

Almost the same intro could be used to say that «success» (i.e., for example, a bigger apartment) is only a means to get more sex (and through it reproductive success), but nevertheless it keeps us from cheat-flavoured complexity-collapsing strategies (as it, for example, constrains your daily experience to the same settings). That’s why it is impolite to ask a potential mate for his bank account…)

[from some very old notebook]

There is a short-cut. The basic mechanism of our use of language is something i will (imprecisely) call “frames of mind”. And the trick is to assume the frame-of-mind of the new language before you understand it.

A frame of mind is not a list or set of things you remember, but instead a mode you put your brain in. It is almost the same path we use to adapt to diverse social contexts: Instead of repeating the rules of behaviour to yourself, you just assume the attitude. Similarly, you don’t try to remember all the words in Italian, you conjure up into yourself “Italian mode”.

The basic error language-learners do again and again is confusing learning a language with understanding it. Words are actions, and they have performative power unrelated to their meaning. To arrive at the meaning you make use of your frame of mind. You picture this word inside this frame, and from the contextual clues you infer possible meanings, sometimes speculatively.

So, for example, if someone shows you an empty cup and shouts “Aqua”, you’ll know he is thirsty, even if you don’t know this word means water. What you need to know is just that in this context it makes sense for him to say the word.

That is why most of the time we do not need ask what new words mean, we just figure out from context. This is also why we can understand what a word means by hearing an explanation that consists of other words, and has absolutely nothing in common with the thing the word refers to. And finally that is why language is useful at all, since if we could only communicate things the other person already knew it would be a very lame technique.

But the frame of mind comes first, is independent, more important, and not completely explainable in terms of meaning. In other words, from the italian-frame-of-mind you can understand the rules of Italian, but not the other way around.

Some times you’ll hear references to a stage of language learning when you “stop translating”. That is when your new-language-frame stands by itself. When you don’t need to switch to native-language-frame in order to work. If you follow the standard way to learn a language that is what you are looking for. But if you learn a lot of translations from the new language into your native one, what you’re doing is just creating barriers to this new frame. Every time you hear that word you set yourself into the other frame, and this will make it harder and harder to get the new frame, the new frame will become correlated in your memories to images of failure and feeling lost.

Instead of this, you can stop falling back to your previous frame when you don’t understand something. This of course means you’ll be a little dumber, you’ll understand less of what people say. It is like you had gone back to talking like a child. But this can also be a very creative way of communicating, if you embrace it. It is funny, it is improvisational, it is risky and lively.

How exactly you activate the new frame is a little too introspective a thing, it is like describing which muscle to pull in order to pee. But it is not too difficult, really. You need to assume the attitude. You can use some very basic phrases to achieve this, something you like to say to yourself in this new language.

Once you do, you are faced with new contexts which you can’t penetrate deeply. You can only stay at the surface. But you’ll probably realize there is more to them than you get. That is why your brain will be trying to look further, and, in so doing, learning a lot of this new language of yours.

Our brains are actually quite good at creating new frames and switching between them and using them. That means learning a new language can be quite fun. Just do it the easy way.

One of the inventors of this silliness was Hesiod. This was the guy who made a pure rational account of greek mythology. In other words, up to him, everyone saw Zeus and the storms as more or less the same thing, and whichever intentions or personality they construed onto Him was not really different from us web-2-dot-oh people ascribing feeling to our computers. But Hesiod came up with this manoeuvre whereby he excised Zeus-personality from thunder-phenomena. In some ways, this amounts to inventing the contemporary idea of «phenomena».

Nevertheless, when Hesiod made a pure rational account of the Greek Gods, he was exercising the worship of one of the Greek Gods, which Nietzsche called Apollo but for all we care could as well be Athena. In this sense his account could equally be seen as a theological argument, and at that one of the worst kind, for it was both metaphysical (in the contemporary sense of being an exclusively God-against-God affair with scant consequence in secular business) and bargaining (as it denies utterly anyone else’s right to believe differently). His God was the one who liked arguments better than sacrifices, but both where forms of worship.

Strikingly, his assumption is that there was some kind of power in talking about things without doing anything about them, that words or symbols could could command actual, graspable, real stuff. This kind of practice could only come about in the context of an organized religion. And as he proposed his own practice to be stronger than all others, qualitatively, he bred the illusion that thinking is not a form of action.

From there, a series of mistakes led to such contemporary maladies as “Maths is the language of Nature” or the “11th thesis on Feuerbach“. Maybe someone could follow this thread. But for now let’s just see how belief systems are all equally fictional, whether it’s science or mythology, and that being literature is one of their strengths.

[This post is a preview of "Greek Prejudice", a post planned to feature on RefTemp#04!]