sweet effay

Given recent comments here and over at K-Punk, I have finally been goaded into responding to slinging together a few more thoughts on Cold Rationalism. Before that, though, I would just like to say that whilst I disagree profoundly with Mark (I probably wouldn’t bother reading K-Punk otherwise), I do not see any mileage in calling him a neurotic twat or whatever. Furthermore, I understand what he means by ‘punk’ and can recognize polemic when I see it.

Quotations by Mark are from this article.

One of the main points I agree with Mark about is the desirability for ‘hacking outside the human OS’ (I would prefer to say overcoming the molar boundaries of the broadly Kantian framework which the majority inhabit). However, I’m certain that we disagree on the techniques involved for doing this; not least because I’m willing to try reducing reason into a cowering heap and seeing what happens when something else takes over (just don’t do this too often kids). I would also argue that it is impossible to permanently exist satisfactorily outside the boundaries, particularly within society (consider Artaud). I am not clear about Mark’s position on this, but I get the impression that he sees it as desirable to somehow leave the human OS altogether.

Of course, one can (and probably should) apply reason to these events after the fact, but they cannot be accessed purely via reason. This is why I am not a Rationalist.

Are these processes machinic as Mark claims? Very probably, but they are outside of pure reason; even the Spinozist definition of expanded reason which Mark employs (the imagination is not a necessary source of error, as Spinoza would have it; it can also be a source of creation). We should note that psychoanalysis was founded and developed upon the study of individuals who either were, or were labelled as, irrational. Some aspects of psychoanalysis are indeed based upon theories which could be labelled machinic or fluid mechanics, but we should not forget that its major claim is the ability to heal the ‘sick’ and reintegrate them into ‘civilized’ human society. Psychoanalysis is based upon an anthropocentric and, for the most part, humanist model of the psyche (humanism to be understood as the view that humans are superior to other forms of life, possessing a uniquely instrumental relation to the world; a view often bound up with a teleological movement of human perfectibility). This is most apparent in its relationship to myth.

Mark is correct when he says that psychoanalysis ‘shows that, yes, there is something unique about human beings, but this uniqueness is above all the source of specifically human miseries’. He just neglects to mention that it also demonstrates the existence of specifically human joys.

Anyhow, the crux of my disagreement lies here:

The great Cold Rationalist lesson is that everything in the so-called personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect which, in principle if not in fact, could be delineated very precisely. And this act of delineation, this stepping outside the character armour that we have confused with ourselves, is what freedom is. [my emphasis]

What this is saying is that we ought to be able to delineate everything in terms of impersonal processes of cause and effect, but we cannot do so yet. This is either a statement of failure, in which case the rational thing to do would be to look outside the necessitated causal chains of Spinoza; or a strongly teleological claim for the perfectibility of science in general (not just neuroscience in particular) which is akin to an act of divination. Should such huge leaps in science be made, all well and good, but in the meantime, the evidence is simply not there to legitimize such a reductive worldview. Speaking personally [sic], I’m happy to let the physicists work on their own Philosopher’s Stone of the Grand Unified Theory of Science, and investigate other approaches in the meantime.

Of course, if I’m wrong, I’ll be happy to admit my error and convert to Rationalism (Cold or otherwise) on the very day that everything in the world can be practically demonstrated to proceed from necessitated causal chains, i.e. the day on which all the machines can be programmatically run. I’ll also be ready to concede that philosophy and psychoanalysis are completely useless.

However, to end on one last point, which I barely understand but have always been impressed by when people who do understand it have attempted to demonstrate it to me: Does not Gödel demonstrate that any formal system cannot contain the solution to every formula within it, but that one must always have recourse to a theory outside the system in order to prove such a formula? If this is the case, the chances of reducing the entire world to formulae via a Grand Unified Theory look rather slim. I don’t know enough about Gödel’s Theorem to say what its implications are for Rationalism in general.