Origins - Ought from Is from Ought

Preface O (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)

So should we distrust our inner drive the way Hobbes had it? Was he right to entrench fear at the very center of our modern self? Should we trust authority, for fear of offing each other like savage brutes? My mommy would not have had any of it when she was sitting with her wonderfilled eyes pointing to the picture of a cow saying ‘moo’ until I said ‘moo’ back to her. She was not establishing her authority over me in forcing me to moo. Her science was an entirely gay science¹ at moments of moo. She was playful in triangulating a world with me - like I was joyful in learning to participate in this, our, wondrous world of words.

Or should we trust our inner drive the way Rousseau had it? Was he right to hold that it is society corrupting us? Should we distrust civilization, for being civilized alienates us from what is pure in our original self? My truth is that going back to nature frightens me, because I know for sure I stand no chance to survive in that hell. Nature is for the healthy. For happy campers whose fathers didn’t look with melancholic eyes at their children praying that they did not inherit that melancholy from him (quod non!). Holding on to nature is a thin disguise for holding on to the privilege of the ability to survive in (even) less civilized circumstances.

The problem of both Rousseau and Hobbes is a problem at the origin of the modern, self centered, West which sees the individual self as the centre of the universe, and forgets the support of daring mothers and mooing daddies in - also literally - getting that individual off the ground. Cutting ourselves from this nurturing origin started the quest for natural origins untainted by the dreary drab of dabbling around in diapers under constant supervision. We see ourselves as grown-ups and forget our growing up (therefore remaining stuck in what are puerile fantasies of constant competition, but more on that later). The Western scientific minds say that particulars infect the apple of our universal knowledge but my mother knew (as I know as a father) that they fertilize the tree of knowledge. It is Descartes who turned the tree of knowledge upside down: ethics is not an offshoot of physics but it is - and was - the other way around: love comes before knowledge. If we are ‘sick animals’², at least our illness is such that it is also its only cure (ponder that for a little while, I won’t come back to it later).

How could we have forgotten that, contra Hobbes, love comes before knowledge and that, contra Rousseau, at the same time knowledge is what enhances love? Refusing intimacy between love and knowledge - between is and ought - arguably is central to the European identity that firmly believes knowledge and love ought to be eternally divorced. There is no room for lovey-dovey mooing or melancholic madness to interfere with the harsh, pristine masculinity of Eurocentric epistemology. In memory of my daring mommy and my mooing daddy, this has to be denounced as the Eurocentric error. Unfortunately, solving that error will take generations. Luckily, exposing it will need just one, somewhat long, paragraph.

For Aristotle, science grows out of rationality that in turn grows out of logos which is based on an open Socratic dialogue in a society of free individuals who can face up to themselves in a mirror. We are perfectible, even if never altogether perfect. What we know is incomplete, with as pleasant side effect that there always remains something to learn. What the Greeks didn’t, however, make explicit was that logos involved at least two people in a world independent from both (Aristotle moo’d with his mommy too). This failure got inextricably entangled with the Judeo-Christian Manichean myth of the original sin: you are born corrupted so you can live a sickness unto death trying to deliver yourself to the heavenly gates of your God (conveniently represented on this Earth by the rich and mighty who are hiding behind earthly gates of power, pomp and circumstance, but I shan’t digress in what is going to be a, somewhat long, paragraph). The rest, as we Westerners are not prepared to say, is history. It allowed Descartes to invent an ego and forget its father, building the scientific bridge between the I and the cosmos which simply cannot be. Do not, by the way, think of Western atheism as the evolution out of superstition. Think of Western atheism as a self-protecting evolution of this error, entrenching the anti-moo’ing meme of meritocracy.

I fear this paragraph, in retrospect, needs to have the length of a book to do justice to the injustice created by the supremacy implicit in the separation of the white ivory of detached science from the ebony emotionality of childish attachment. Luckily this is just a preface so I can hasten to provisionally conclude that colonialism is of a piece with the very idea of a separation between is and ought. Liberation of knowledge, as Frantz Fanon post-colonially had it, presupposes liberation of people (no coincidence the Greeks were bothered by a lot of things, slavery notably not being one of them). The problem is not that we cannot get from an is to an ought, and at best are left standing - although still with that noose around our necks. The brute fact is that we only get from an ought to an is. Hobbes was enough of a naturalist to still appreciate this brute fact literarily creating a deus ex machina to rescue an us in the face of the disconnected I. His us was, however, infused by a puerile personal view that only the fittest survive. This allowed Rousseau to proclaim the “Northern European” to reign, in his view which is being held ever more widely in the West: rightfully, supreme³.

The truth is both beautiful and merciful. Survival is not what befalls those surviving a harsh competition. They die lonely and helpless. Survival befalls the trustworthy, those that moo. Those in whom the weak can trust to rise up against a monolithic ideal of level-headedness. There is no design flaw (or no original sin, if we refer to the original story of our origin). Our origin lies just in continually mending injustices by attaching ourselves to the plight of the oppressed. Truth is continually on the move, not toward some abstract ideal, but away from very concrete wrongs. As Lugones had it: becoming is the life of our parties, being is merely what we drag there tired after a week of work.

You might be shocked to learn that we are stuck in this tension. Just like when I tried - three times - to explain to my kids against rigid pubescent opposition that revolution is not the solution to clear - once and for all - the woes of the world, only to ask myself whether my compliance wasn’t just chickening out to the invisible hand of capitalism. There always is an alternative. We just have to think of new ones over and over again. Determinism sucks. Indeterminacy rules. I trust my eyes but fear the freezing over of our language in clean cut categories.

In this book, I will address you, lovingly, as my children; knowing I still have much to learn, but I hope to show you the power of ‘moo’.

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/abennett96/3226476233/

1. The joke of history is on Nietzsche for this term. I think he would have appreciated the joke and those of his ‘followers’ who don’t, well, haven’t understood a single word he has written.

2. As, again, Nietzsche had it, thereby correctly elevating illness to the true nobility of health.

3. If you don’t believe me on this, read Derrida (although I know this remark will not convince those who - with a self full of themselves - decided that tracing the origin of our intellectual complacency is irrelevant).