The way Koffman’s conception of Nietzsche’s genealogy works is:  the Jews have  a conception of God as a God of victory and a warrior class, but this only worked so long as they were winning.

The next step is of course they start to lose.  Their armies falter and their crops fail.  But instead of looking at the institution of God being corrupt, they inverted the power on themselves.

Now they begin to blame themselves; they weren’t religious enough, pious enough, moral enough.  It wasn’t God’s fault, it was the fault of the Jews for not believing hard enough.

This, Koffman writes, is a power inversion that cements the system.  It’s a pretty safe system if it’s in place for 5000+ years, right?  Debatable.

The interesting notion for me here is the nature of inversion-revolution as ironically  that which cements the powers that be.

Sound familiar?

I thought it did, which is why I think this sort of “power inversion as cementing the powers that be” applies way too well onto the nature of revolution in academia

The Chancellors leave every two years because of resignations.  I wrote in a column at school “Chancellor’s transfer is no strange change” and I thought it was because of the nature of scandal in the schools.

Look, if the chancellors are all that qualified, why are they resigning all of the time?  The resignations are a perfect example of corruption cementing itself.

So if we take a page out of Nietzsche’s book, we shouldn’t blame ourselves when the Chancellors, or any of the members of a corrupt academia resign; we should rather implement changes to make sure such problems never happen again.

Chancellor Oblinger resigned when the public found out he had hired the governor’s wife to an unmerited position whereupon she made too much money for not enough work.

1. Gary Locke — Current US Ambassador to China.  The contradiction is Locke is American born, but ethnically Chinese.  When Locke has visited China, he has created controversy among Chinese people because he acts like an ordinary American citizen.  Chinese people use this as a point to criticize Chinese government officials, who use expensive airplane tickets, for example.  For his part, Ambassador Locke has used the post to aggressively criticize human rights’ violations (from the Washington Post).  So the contradiction is the ethnically Chinese American uses the post to criticize China.

2. Francis Collins — Current National Institutes of Health Director.  Director Collins is a fundamentalist Christian.  This is a contradiction explored by a 2010 New Yorker article; and the contradiction is more or less the entire thesis of the profile.  The post-versus-director is a contemporary instance of the science versus religion debate; the NIH is one of the ways the government supports stem cell research.  This organization came under funding under the Bush Administration.  Director Collins uses his faith as a tool to show people faith and science can mix, but also as a way to deflect criticism.  I have personally noticed there has been far less discussion about the NIH and stem cell research during the Obama Administration.

3.  President Obama himself — makes the case for a transcendent politics by being the case-in-point.  During the Reverend Wright scandal, then-candidate Obama made a speech about how the country was moving beyond racism.  President Obama does not mention, of course, that he is his own proposed fulcrum of a transition.

Two Philosophical Interpretations of President Obama’s Move

On this blog, we’ve talked about the Law of Explosion in logic, the rules of Hegelian Synthesis, Albert Camus’ absurd reasoning, of course the reduction to the absurd in logic (reductio ad absurdum), and finally the law of non-contradiction.

A friend of mine was telling me Hegelian Synthesis only works in retrospect, but this leaves one wanting a predictable formula.  Yet for Obama’s Administration, we could surely see any of these changes as necessary reactions to previous actors.  Why should we need a black President, or a Chinese American Ambassador, or a believing scientist?  Perhaps because there was such a lack beforehand.

A more fun perspective on President Obama’s move is certainly the law of logical explosion, which says that if we allow a contradiction, the entire system in a mathematically logical formal language allows anything to be true.

Real Consequences

The pragmatic perspective on all of this is surely the one the President is using.  That is, employing these contradictions works for the purpose he has given them.

Q:  What purpose has he given them?

A:  For the purpose of criticizing China, he employed the Chinese American diplomat.  For the purpose of deflecting criticism about the NIH and atheism, he employed a Christian director.  For the purpose of deflecting criticism about his race, he employed his race as a card that could not be played (that the campaign was post-racial).

So from this inquiry I surely recognize it’s not zero sum ( 1 – 1 = 0).  The fallout from these contradictions gives real benefits, and real consequential benefits; from many standpoints including my own.

The consequences of President Obama being the first black president are surely greater than his merely getting elected, same for the other two examples.  I certainly appreciate a David’s advantage, as in David and Goliath, that the minority possesses an advantage from being a minority.  One considers the advantages of left-handedness in sports; and perhaps President Obama had split seconds in his debates with Senator McCain whereupon Senator McCain was distracted by President Obama’s blackness.

I still have much thinking to do about this strategy, so I’m going to end this post with sayings from Nietzsche, “Whoever meets his ideal, transcends it eo ipso.”  This of course translates into, whoever meets his idea, transcends it by being it.  I often thought of my high school running career, whereupon breaking my personal record (my idea), meant simply the marker went up, the goal time went down a few seconds more.  The pithy comment applies to American consumerism — on to the next one, as in shopping, drinking, popular foo fighters songs — but also applies to the divine nature of man.  Nietzsche had criticism for ideals, but he also had great respect for men, and the greatest respect for men who lived their ideals.  In addition to living their ideals is of course meeting their ideals from challenges.  One time a friend criticized me for saying existentialists were goal-oriented.  Well, here’s an example.  Nietzsche seems to be a goal-setter for people who strive to meet their ideals through challenges.  I might be reaching here.  The application to President Obama is this latter, divine interpretation of the saying;  President Obama meets his ideals, and transcendence is the consequence.

This is a fine entry point into our second quote of Nietzsche’s, “The only strength is the excess of strength.”  This is another notion of ideals and limitations.  The limitation of strength is if you die doing whatever you’re diong, you were not strong enough for that challenge.  In this case we might notice how President Obama is using these contradictions not to stay on the subject, but to move on.  People have begun discussing how President Obama is a bad president because he has not embodied hope and change, like he promised.  Nevertheless, I wonder President Obama might enjoy a sort of subconscious pleasure:  that getting over the fact he was the first black President was part of the point.

1)  Power inversions – Hegel’s most famous theme is the master-slave dialectic.  Despite the icky terminology, it was used by Marx, making it the most important  and popular philosophy ever to be used in practice.  I like how Nietzsche uses it in the Genealogy of Morals, but this work hasn’t been as important or popular.    In fact, Nietzsche totally digs on power inversions in general, but never actually gives a proper description of what’s going on.  Hegel does.

Power inversions, sidestepping obvious literal Marxist Revolutions, are what Revolution people are all about.

2)  Freestyle babbling as a way to make a point.  Goldschneider’s revolutionary will have a sensitive-intuitive thrust.  What this means is they sometimes ramble on and on in order to come around to a point.  Enter Hegel, who totally does this.  Readers complain about this.

3)  Being so traditional or practical that you come all the way around and seem superstitious again.  This is a literal and figurative conceptual revolution.  Goldschneider’s revolutionary people use a particular authority trick of using a different system in order to topple the people currently in charge.  In order to get rid of the system, they supplant it with a different one.  Hegel’s ideas start with basic commonsense notions that become wild metaphysical kudzu very quickly.

4)  Notion or love of conflict is fundamental to Hegel’s philosophy and the Revolutionary philosophy Goldschneider describes.

Here are some songs I recorded by myself at my house. “Praise the Girl” was co-written with Doug Campese.

Go to the link and download the file as a zip. A bunch of people have been confused about how to do it, so it’s cool if you can’t figure out how.

I didn’t enter two other finished songs with this file, and they are “The Bomb” and “Swamp Rock”.

Generally speaking, people completely understand the concept isaibin.  People don’t understand where the word ‘isaibin’ came from.  Truth be told, I just created the word.  One figures the inventor of onomatopoeia, when he was alive, simply did the same thing.

Nevertheless, considering people never understood isaibin until I explained onomatopoeia a little better, and then parralleled the genesis of the word.  Onomatopoeia is simply a compound word.  Look it up on wikipedia.  Translated from the Greek, it’s “to make” and “sound”.  Onomatopoeia strictly translated into English would be tomakesound, just like playground is a combination of the separate words ‘play’ and ‘ground’.

Following this line of creation, I figured out which Greek roots I was trying to imitate when I came up with isaibin.  The roots I’ve got are “iso” which means the same, which is the first part of the word.  The second part of the word is “saibin” which sounds like “psilocybin”, and cybin comes from the root “kube”, which means head.  In other words, iso means same and cybin-saibin means head, so same head.  This completely fits because isaibin uses the same word as onomatopoeia, it uses the same head.

Graphic display of the concepts

What the concepts are:

Onomatopoeia –> transliterated sound

Bang (sound) —-> becomes ‘Bang’ (word is onomatopoeia)

Where the concepts come from:

Onomatopoeia –>  literally the words “to make” and “sound” in Greek

Playground –>  literally the words “play” and “ground” in English

Isaibin –>  iso, which means “same” and “saibin” which comes from the Greek root “kube” which means head

1.  Proximate cause ethics — if the self X is  a network of cause-effect relationships, ethically the appropriate focus should be on that part of X, and not entirely the self.  (Using Determinist ethics, such as Otsuka and Frankfurt)

2.  Kinetic Freedom versus Potential Freedom — In describing choices, there’s a difference between doing and having the ability to do because the nature of time is mutually exclusive to multiple options (Using the Chocolate Cake versus Dogfood problem).

3.  Isaibin — Onomatopoeia when used for extra connotative meanings in addition to sounds.  ”Bang” from  a gun is a basic transliteration, but the idiom is more connotative in “More bang for your buck” and even more connotative when saying, “she totally banged him”.  (Here, this functions as a counterexample to Analytic philosophy, such as Russell’s famous “On Denoting”).

4.  Insult’s proof as critique of analytic and stoic philosophy.  The insult’s proof I had was a cross between a commonsense “if the shoe fits, wear it” philosophy of insults combined with a naive analytic philosophy.  This naive analytic philosophy says if a proposition corresponds to some sort of embodied or conceptual reality, then that relationship between the two is true (and if it doesn’t correspond appropriately then it is false).  The “if the shoe fits” becomes stoicism (and not mere proselytization) when forcing ourselves to cow to this; example is: Eleanor Roosevelt said, “no one can make you feel bad without your consent”.  Nevertheless, when chasing this point of view down we find it to be false.  I can with merit still feel bad when my friend calls me an orangutang even though I am not an orangutang.  Absurdly, (even in the Camus-Pascal sense of absurd) I can feel bad with merit if someone calls me a popsicle and I feel bad about it.   Shockingly, I think these people who feel insulted are the correct ones.

In this last position, and looking at the four overall, we notice two or three bold sweeps of positions have swung their pendulums back.  Firstly, this last post tangentially smacks of a new philosophy of emotions I see in Nussbaum from Upheavals of Thought and Strawson’s one essay “Freedom and Resentment”, and from these research projects we found on wikipedia Strawson was updating a Hume position.  This follows a broad arc in contemporary philosophy where philosophers attempt to wrangle emotions as useful forms of intelligence.

Next, these four points remind me of the dramatic swing in my position caused by the realization of the mirror fallacy.  That’s how I was able to invent isaibin at all.

Finally, these points have a critical bent to them (Doesn’t Dewey say all philosophy should?  whatever).  We might conservatively note that anyone’s best work should obviously come from a little bit of research, so that shows with these four positions.  Furthermore, the shape of the criticism is basically the same; that by taking an embodiment of the philosophies in a different situation (hopefully more useful and more commonplace), and finding them coming-up-short, we then try to offer a better solution.  If this reads like just about every contemporary philosophy research paper from the past century, so much the better.   I have  made a personal stride by using Nietzsche and Lakoff to consider language as metaphoric, which seems to legitimize my positions and this method of criticism; but my change in perspective came after I came up with all of these positions except isaibin, so it’s more of a rationalization of these positions in hindsight.

My point is simply that if one cannot break the mirror fallacy on his own, maybe he could ask someone else to.  Breaking the mirror fallacy means to work creatively.

Don’t we do this all of the time?  If I can’t think of a new song to listen to, that I haven’t heard yet, I can ask my friends to tell me about a new song.  I can type into Pandora to play a new song.

Isn’t this another solution to the philosophical puzzle, “Can you think of a thought you haven’t had?”  Maybe the answer is, “no, but I can think of someone who can.”  You go to them and get the thoughts going.

Therefore, existential creation doesn’t have to be done all alone, in our basic rudimentary sense and of course, now in a philosophical sense.

First of all, let me say I have a conscience and I do bad things.  Nietzsche is against both of these because in the first case, conscience is a creation by society, traditions-religion, and often the individual herself; and in the second case, good and evil don’t really exist, and they especially don’t exist in most of the baloney trivial cases people come up with.  So for this blog post, we’re forgetting about both of these criticisms and assuming I do bad stuff, and secondly that I do bad stuff knowingly.

The argument in my head has heretofore been like this:

Thought 1:  I’m about to do something wrong and

Thought 1a: Person B (my mom, my girlfriend, my favorite ethics professor Dr. Hinton) is going to be mad at me about this.

Thought 2:  Yes, but if Person B actually knew the whole story, she wouldn’t be mad at me.

So you can have your pick, and again not everything that I feel bad about has actually been bad or worth feeling bad about.  For me, I’ve had this feeling about not doing my homework, or having beers, and countless others.  And also for me, the thought process really does center on who I’m going to have a very boring and grievous conversation with.  I’ve also had an alteration of this argument when I once believed in God.  That is, God will forgive me because God knows and understands everything.  God knows I’m about to drink a beer because hey, he preordained the whole shebang.

Here’s where Hegel comes in.  Hegel’s quote is, “When you point one place, you point everywhere.”  We recognize this is about abusing context.  We then applied it to the naughty philosophy professor’s joke, which makes an identity between a class of students, and floating metaphysical junk.  In the naughty professor’s joke, the students are random, metaphysical junk, and there’s no real point in giving good grades because there is no individual will to get good grades.   Here, the forest for the trees problem is the whole solution.  When one stops cropping the context of grades to suit chaos, he might then start editing the context to reveal how students really do work.

Back to the example at hand, I have done a similar abuse to context with my act of legitimizing my wrongdoing.  So, adding to our premises above, I’ll copy and paste:

Thought 1:  I’m about to do something wrong and

Thought 1a: Person B (my mom, my girlfriend, my favorite ethics professor Dr. Hinton) is going to be mad at me about this.

Thought 2:  Yes, but if Person B actually knew the whole story, she wouldn’t be mad at me.

Thought 3:  This is an abuse of context, because when you point one place, you point everywhere.  You have expanded the case so far as to have missed the point.

Finally, the turnaround:  how should we then proceed?  In light of this discussion, how should we go about editing context in order to preserve a correct moral choice?  The answer is I don’t know.  I think decision making is another blog post, but ultimately I agree with Nietzsche that bad conscience and good and evil are largely constructions.

Rick was the one who originally told me the Hegel quote, and I did ask him about this particular example.  He quoted Albert Camus, from his work The Rebel (probably), and the quote was, “The sun was shining on the back of my head, and I shot him.”  I said to Rick that the Light has connotations of morality and goodness, and that Camus was making a point about how democratic and egalitarian God’s morality is, that the sun shines on all of us.  Rick said he didn’t think that was the right interpretation.  Then I said it has to do with the character’s steadfastness, that whatever was happening, he still went ahead and shot the guy.  Rick said he didn’t think that was the right interpretation, either.  This is the inconclusive ending of this blog post, then.

I danced like an idiot, and let me tell you, it was difficult dancing like an idiot.  I had to be courageous, because I wasn’t grinding, and because I was dancing alone on the dance floor; and I also had to be inventive because I wasn’t doing any particular type of dance, I was just coming up with whatever came to mind.

Meanwhile, Damon asked a girl to dance and she immediately began rubbing her bottom on his crotch.  This is normal grinding.  Damon leaned over to her and whispered into her ear, “You call that dancing?”  The girl laughed and walked away.  After we left, Damon said dancing is over.  He means, universally speaking, if all dancing is grinding now, then dancing as an art or sport is over.

Before we go on about how much Damon is a heartbreaker and how he ruined this girl’s life, I have to hand it to him.  This woman, despite the patterns of society and dance clubs, immediately assumed this kid wanted to grind, when he didn’t.  There comes a time when a person’s passive petitioning, or assumptions are wrong.  She made the assumption and he didn’t.  I recognize he could have phrased it a bit nicer, however.

For my part, I do think grinding counts as dancing. I also respect it as a tradition.  Wikipedia’s entry (at least a while ago) on grinding dancing says it originated in the Carribean. My big moral problem with grinding is the seemingly misogynist and sexist tendencies it entails, but this is short sighted for two basic reasons.  First, when grinding is done in the Caribbean style, women do experience pleasure from it.  Secondly, the whole emphasis on sexual pleasure for the woman in terms of dancing is not really the point.  The reason women like grinding is because it’s simple, easy, and because a lot of people do it.  It also does have parts and connotations of endearment: people get together and start hooking up and dating from dancing together, even by grinding.

The fact that grinding emphasizes the man or the sexual act is entirely the point.  When I dance alone doing my organic-style robot dance, I’m a target.  Damon brought up the lindy hop or the jitterbug; and these are excellent complementary foils to what I’m describing.  Damon’s lindy hop and jitterbug, and swing dances in general, are difficult and artistic.  This is Nietzschean Democratization at its best, and at its worst.  In Nietzsche’s writing, for an offhand example The Flies of the Marketplace in thus Spoke Zarathustra, the philosopher describes how making something incredibly popular can make it incredibly dumb.  This is just about any angst-ridden teenager’s complaint about anything popular, and you could look at the Jersey Shore, or music, or technology for this critique.  So for people who are good at dance, or who care about dancing as an art or sport, this democratization is necessarily a downgrading.  For those of us, like myself, who bear scrutiny for being bad dancers, and who also lasciviously love the pleasure of grinding, this democratization is totally awesome.

The disenfranchised here definitely include the elite.  One easily imagines a ballet dancer or a break dancer who go to a dance club and find grinding despicable.  In fact, the movie Black Swan even has a scene where the main character, a ballet dancer, feels alienated at a club.  For our part, we’re too busy dancing to even notice these disenfranchised artists.  Other naysayers are old people, who find this new sexy dancing too sexy and too over-the-top (but that’s what they always say, right?), feminists who don’t sympathize or empathize with actual females who actually like grinding, and my friends who like me feel awkward about doing the dance.  And in this train of thought, grinding is a very Nietzschean subversive morality.  Because the two are mutually exclusive: grinding takes place at the expense of the lindyhop.  If you’re grinding, you’re not lindyhopping.  In this way, grinding has usurped other dances.  It is a clash of philosophical positions, to say the least.

Lastly, on a different note, there’s another Nietzschean attack going on with grinding’s subversive morality.  To preface: Nietzsche describes Spinoza’s philosophical  project as an attack using reasons, where everyone else was using passions.  Spinoza seeks to contain the passions, and this is a large part of his project in the Ethics.  More to the point, by using reasons, Spinoza flabbergasted everyone.  In displaying his reasoning axiomatically, and in his sense, mathematically, Spinoza blew other reasons out of the water.  No longer could religions claim reasons for doing particular traditions just because they were traditional.  The fact that religions had not sought to use this type of reasoning before is exactly the case in point; Spinoza’s attack is basically, they should have.

What we have with grinding is actually the reciprocal:  passions are used where reasons fail.  Reasons abound in ballet.  One splays her thumb flush with the wrist, and there’s the pirouettes, and on and on.  All of these are for reasons to make the dance beautiful.  They are also comparatively neutral in terms of sexuality.  Break dancing is a mechanical mastery of the body, and the metaphor follows all the way to the paradigms of breakdancing, the “robot” and the “pop and lock”.  Grinding is a passion attack.  Its reasoning is the feel of another person’s body against one’s own.  Again, if you’re spending time analyzing how people are grinding, they probably don’t give a fuck because it feels so good, and you’ve missed the point.  Ballet dancers, as always, remain open to vicious and horrific critical scrutiny.

A more or less basic criticism would be Rick’s famous maxim, that when I told him technology and civilization gave us houses to live in, he said, “Yes, they can give us houses to live in, but can they show us how to live in those houses?” So, this criticism reads: lots of knowledge, and no wisdom.

A general example would be some sort of societal problem like the flu. The average man proponents then sample everyone who has the flu and make a vaccine based on that flu. The pattern recognition says you or I will then (if affected by the flu) be cured based on the pattern. This is great.

Yet, on a different note, an average man argument could be predicated entirely wrong. If no one was paying a whole lot of attention to these things, people could make big mistakes.

More on this later. I have to think more about it.