Sunday, January 21, 2007

Reply to Sara

Sara's comment left me puzzled. I somehow convinced myself that the mere mention of self-determination right next to utility would suffice. I see it does not. When I first read here comment I thought that the problem was merely that of making explicit what the internal psychological process might look like. I thought of talking about the frontal lobe, which is believed to be in charge of the inhibition and, thus, of self-determination. I believe there must be a way in which the neurons in this part of the brain fire in a way that ends up having certain substances running around the brain and the nervous systems. Sometimes you get endorphines, sometimes adrenaline, and sometimes don't.

But then I thought this was too sketchy, too easy, too obvious. So I started thinking for a way to connect self-determination with a feeling of well-being. Then I realized I was getting into trouble since my account was Kantian in spirit. Things would have been different if it were Aristotle who inspired my claims. Happiness is always in the viccinity, no matter what you do in the Liceo. Coincidentally, I happen to be reading Aristotle seriously these days. Victor Caston is guiding. We are getting into Aristotle's philosophy of mind, which happens to be a very pragmatic one. In his "Movement of Animals" Aristotle presents a pragmatic account of the mind that seems to me to be more complete than some contemporary ones (like that of Stalnaker). According to the Stagirite, movement is the cause of animals having perceptual capacities. Thus, animals move because they have objects of thought or desire. But merely having objects of thought is not enough; just like it is not enough to merely conceive possible states of the world (as Stalnaker seems to assume). It is also required, claims Aristotle, that the animal be able to represent good or bad. Thus, it is necessary to conceive a possible state of the world and to conceive it as good or bad. The former gets the animal to approach the object, to do what is needed the represented state happen. The latter gets the animal to avoid the object, to do what is needed to preclude the represented state from taking place.

So far so good, but how does this answer sara's question. Well, I don't know how well this fits the Kantian view I initially sketched (some, probably sara, will object). My answer, however, is simple: when an action is the result of a self-determining chain of reasoning it is, more often than not, accompanied by a representation of good, pleasure, or beauty. Thus, these actions, when realized, will almost systematically fulfill a desire, the satisfaction of which accounts for the feeling of utility, happiness and the like.

Monday, January 15, 2007

The Feeling of Uselessness

There is a connection between Marx’s dictum “his work constitutes the man” and the feeling of uselessness fostered in contemporary Academe. It is well known that one of Marx’s goals was the denunciation of the individual’s detachment from its work product. It turned out to be like a detachment from itself, some sort of alienation. I believe that this same alienation is directly connected with the personal satisfaction with one’s own work (which need not be a matter of product detachment) and self-determination of one’s own activities. The former is connected with a feeling of utility, or uselessness, the latter with a feeling of liberation, or asphyxiation. That is to say, the kind of self-alienation that Marx aims at is not chiefly a matter of product detachment, I believe, but mainly a matter of self-determination. Sometimes it is not enough to be attached to the product of your work to feel identified or not alienated from it.

Satisfactory actions result in a feeling of utility. I believe this feeling can only come when the individual determines by herself what that action will be. When this latter condition is not met then it’s only uselessness and dissatisfaction that results. Take the case of academics. The academic is not detached from the results of her academic work. Nonetheless, she is still alienated from it. If things were as simple as being attached to one’s own work products, a lot more academic people would be satisfied with their work.

Academic people, more often than not, represent their work as useless. This obviously, though not explicitly, entails that they represent themselves as useless. A further step, very easily taken, is to feel asphyxiated by one’s academic commitments. I think there is a direct connection here. The individual feels liberated when she feels useful; and this might be true even if she is detached from the product of her work. But, how can she find what is useful? I believe that self-determination is all there is to utility. There is a sea of differences between proving the incompleteness of first order logic because one’s own interest lies on the proof and doing it because one’s own candidacy for a PhD in Political Philosophy is at risk. The former is useful, joyful, and liberating, the latter a torture.

That is to say that every human activity is potentially useful or useless. Academic life is full of excruciating activities that burn out the individual’s capacities because they are pre-established and, most of all, externally imposed. It’s easy to feel asphyxiated here. It’s easy to feel useless. It’s easy, however, to solve the problem. All you should morally do, as Kant says, is do what you want. Even throwing stones into the river can be the most useful and liberating practice if one decides to do it by oneself.

Of course, it’s not easy to know what is in one’s will. This is probably something that is sometimes discovered and sometimes determined. To feel useless and asphyxiated has, perhaps, a positive result in this case. It tells us what it is that we do not want to do in the most clear-cut possible way. To feel useless is to know what it is to do something useful, and sometimes even to know what would be useful to do.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

***************I

*El que
********por
************fía
*mata,
*ve
********nado.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Esperanza, Desconsuelo y Tranquilidad

Soy el primero y el último en escribir esta oración. Otros sólo han logrado aproximaciones. Los restantes, copias. Esa es mi esperanza. Pero todo es así. Todos son escritores únicos de sus propias letras. En el mejor de los casos, estas palabras son aproximaciones. En el mejor de los casos, me inclino lentamente a una oración preexistente. Razón suficiente para pensar que más bien soy copista. Ése, mi desconsuelo. Aunque es probable que sea una cuestión de arrogancia. ¿Qué mejor manera de alcanzar la oración que la del copista? ¿Hay acaso un acercamiento mejor logrado? Ésa, mi tranquilidad.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Catalina no está aquí

Catalina está a mis espaldas, sentada, de espaldas a mi. Ella no sabe que es observada. Tampoco sabe que es obsevada por mi. Lleva un suéter negro, que a la distancia se confunde con su cabello castaño, que es, ahora veo, un castaño muy oscuro o, si se prefiere, engañoso. Está sentada frente a una ventana protegida por persianas. Contrario a lo que uno pensaría, no está observando al mundo más allá de su ventana. Al menos, eso me permito conjeturar. Es extraño, lo sé, pero los movimientos de su cabeza no me permiten concluir que así sea. En aquél lado se observa el noreste. En este lado el suroeste. Yo, en este lado, miro su reflejo sobre la ventana más opuesta a la que su mirada se niega a enfrentar. Resulta obvio que es de noche, huelga decir que escribo un ensayo sobre Fichte y que, por ende, mis pies se encuentran cómodamente colocados sobre el escritorio que, a diferencia del café claro sobre el que Catalina piensa y rumia, es negro. Estoy lo más lejos posible de su figura. Si doy un paso más acabaré en la salida de emergencia. Hay todos los metros posibles de distancia entre ella y yo. Según mis cálculos, diez en total. En mi ventana veo mover la mano derecha de su reflejo. La flexiona sin cuidado, con un control sumo y la confianza de quien ha conocido esa mano por años, quizás décadas. La mano va y viene; sube por el cuello para masajear un poco la nuca y luego baja para apoyar el codo en el horizonte del escritorio con el único fin de ofrecer un apoyo a la quijada, que de tanto rumiar no logra sostenerse por sí misma. El vaivén de sus dedos, junto con mis conjeturas y la naturaleza misma del reflejo, me han llevado a concluir, de manera irrefutable, que la mano alcahueta que conciente el rumiar es la izquierda y no la derecha y que hoy, lunes ocho de Enero de 2007 a las veintiún horas, es día y hora en los que Catalina aún no logra facturar el ensayo que sobre el cosmopólita Chamisso tenía pretendido entregar en algún momento del semestre anterior. Sirva todo esto como evidencia de que vivimos en un poblado mayoritariamente universitario, de altos costos inmobiliarios que obligan a rentar áticos de figura irregular y diez metros de máxima extensión, con un sistema empresarial de doce horas diarias de estudio y vacaciones de invierno extremadamente cortas. Porque, aunque de espaldas uno al otro, vivimos ambos en el mismo hemisferio noroccidental. Tanta cavilación y tanta evidencia dejan lugar a una sola duda: ¿qué tanto habrá vivido Chamisso para que Catalina rumie y rumie tanto y tanto?

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Los

Cada vez me preocupan más los filósofos. No sé bién cómo pensarlos. Suelen inspirarme una profusa sensación de atrazo y me encuentro al borde del divorcio justo cuando logran dar algunos pasos. Leo la confesión de algún iluminado.

“It is commonly believed by philosophers that certain classical accounts of perception are vitiated by a funamental flaw, namely that although the account supposes that there is an external world, on the basis of the account itself no proof can be given for the existence of that world.”

Faltas a la impecabilidad papírica como ésta me llevan a plantear dudas. ¿Acaso tienen algo que ver los comunes y sus creencias con los cuentos clásicos y la percepción? ¿Será acaso que los filósofos están confundidos por no saber cómo subdividir el extenso mundo de los sustantivos y mantenerlo separado de la sección de verbos y adjetivos? Este imposibilidad suele resultar en expectativas infundadas. Como, por ejemplo, la expectativa de que la percepción tenga algo que ver con algo así como el mundo externo. En la secundaria siempre me dijeron que la percepción tenía que ver con capacidades fisiológicas, pero nada me dijero sobre el mundo externo, ni el interno y mucho menos sobre el hipodérmico intermediario. Aunque lo más seguro es que con éste sí tenga algo que ver.

Por otra parte confieso que no estoy cierto. La ansiedad se acerca en forma de sospecha. Corro a las notas para encontrar un salvavidas obsequio de algún profesor enpistado. Interno es lo introspectible. Externo lo no introspectible. Si la percepción presupone lo no introspectible, me pregunto en qué enredos se meterán aquellos para hablar de la percepción de lo interno. Seguramente que terminarán por cargar con todo y afirmar, con la certeza de quien tiene a la burra de los pelos por mano, que la introspección presupone la extrospección que a su vez se entiende como la negación de la introspección que no es posible sino con base en esta misma. O sea, que nada se entiende, ni se podrá entender, porque todo entendimiento presupone la pección introyecta del ecto pro, llectado sobre una masa cósmica amorfa. Y ahí sí, ni qué hacerle.