Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Andrew Roberts: The Undermining of Britain to Make Us ASHAMED of Our Past" video.
-
Part 1: Up to 2:00 mins in: Andrew Roberts (Lord Roberts),in his judgement, sets up an opposition between: "our Heroes" and the Marxist Social Justice project(s) that seek to eliminate or reduce them or sublate them even into something else. Lord Roberts seems to present this as an aim or objective of Marxism and Social justice. For Social Justice its not really an aim, rather, the aim, or objective ideal, is equality and justice in and through difference. The emphasis on difference was the starting point for the French philosophical movement, by Derrida Foucault and Deleuze from 1968, in this they claimed to rescue Socialism from its 19th and 20th century interpretations and praxis, that were seen as Statist totalitarian hegemonic, universalist e.g the image of The Soviet Union. Those supposedly anti Soviet Socialists became called or named Social Justice much later. But then this begs the question if the "world view" of Social justice is an apparent antithesis to State totalitarianism, by what right, by what de jure judgement can we claim it to be a Marxist "world view". The answer is really quite simple if we change register or bring in a new regime of logic metaphysics and discourse analysis. The key to Social Justice is that it is not really a world view, rather its a praxis which means a process, an activity, but this activity and its multiplicity of highly creative and contextual moves are subsumed under a "practical" aim and objective as opposed to a cognitive "world view". Practical aims here are determined by: mathematical economic legal objective of Justice and equality ie cognitively and rationally justified by that aim, even though its cannot be given as an object ie in Kant's terms brought to a possible intuition, it can be said to be measurable in terms of multiple differential incremental advances "see Amy Allen "The End of Progress" and John McDowell's Google lecture on YouTube "Intention In Action"). The determining categories of Practical Reason (categories of hypothetical imperatives) all have to follow these cognitive/mathematical criteria at some point for justification de jure, but the day to day praxis are relieved of this in the immediacy since praxis involves structures not given in cognition, and so practical judgement and action here is about tactics and affordances in a context. For example the praxis for advance of the set of black people in some context might mean that some other minority and disenfranchised group will be held back or even pushed backwards by a dynamic metric measure, but this is allowed so long as in the long run equality through difference is achieved. Kant is clear there is no given absolute totality for intuition in Practical Reason, and in theoretical reason it is a mere idea and an error of excess or deficiency in the exercise of our capacity to judge and reason about judgments and reflect on them.
So really the left Social Justice actors are not aimed at getting rid of our "Heroes", rather that's just a local possible strategic move in a context, but subsumable under the equality metric. How it is put in that context though is that the Heroes of the non Social justice cultures and societies, their traditions, statues, museums, documentaries, movies, history's commemorations, are all obstacles, of tradition and habit and ritual, to their equality metric. There argument for this is not dissimilar to the Taylorism of mid 20th century industrial manufacturing, that traditional practices must be abandoned in the white heat of technology. I think Harold Wilson said that meaning increasing production efficiency in all aspects and areas of life. For example the transformation and inspection of family homes of workers for efficiency improvements. Social Justice has combined this type of efficiency end by metric of production with a political aim of equality, they indeed see the two as compatible in terms of new economic theories like Analytical Marxism, eg capitalism destroys itself by processes of wages being driven down by firms for the multiple necessities each has for high profits to deal with internecine competition. They would claim that not only does capitalism destroy its own conditions of possibility due to forces of wage collapse means consumer capacity collapse and no market for goods produces so no production. Social Justice praxisists would claims capitalism creates only a de facto distribution of wealth that repeats various inequalities over time e.g. on race gender and between city and countryside.
1
-
1
-
Part 2: Clearly it didn’t make sense but the consequence was not all these people going into negative equity and or loosing their houses. Rather the Labour government in the UK and the US government followed and took the line the world economic system is very complicated, new financial technologies and laws created unforeseen risks particularly with Banks moving into finance and more investment technologies of mortgage loans leading to regulation lag and anomalous black swan event and so the Banks needed a State funded emergency bailout because if they went bankrupt and closed the whole economy would collapse. So the Bank bailout and several Quantitative Easing moves, printing money, were made. But this was to point and refer only to the symptom, the back hole in the Bank audit. Rather the black hole was all the unpayable middleclass metropolitan mortgages, all those passive incomes that might never be, all appearing not as individual private audit black holes, but rather as if one big black hole in the bank. This was a universal banking crisis so was all the banks i.e. all the private metropolitan mortgages in the Western world.
So the individual private subprime mortgages were bailed out collectively and mediatly though State policy of bailing out the banks, in a effectively declared state of emergency. The State that is tax payers the ordinary public effectively bailed out the private over reached mortgages of the London metropolitan middleclass. In a way this has a kind of synergy with State subsidies of failing industries in the 1970’s, except in the latter case the bailouts are from the more wealthy tax payers to the else well of workers, in the former case it the other way round. Also striking is the fact that the international organisation of the BASIL The Bank of international settlements which effectively was an audit of all the banks audits had made several moves from 1988 I think such that States classed as Sovereign depositors with the banks were categorised as loaners in terms of risk, but they were classed formally as of zero risk which means they are treated by the BIS audit of audits, as having the power to raise and pay an infinite debt hole. This means that while governments described the Sovereign bank bail outs as emergency but necessary measures of unforeseen action due to chance anomalies, really its was a matter of international banking law, a State place in a formal international banking audit, of infinite source of tax and cuts based money supply.
My view is everything that followed politically has been middleclass London driven in order to first hide what the real problem was and what he bail out bailed out was the private middleclass subprime mortgages. There was then, a priori, no real risk in getting high unpayable mortgagers for the middleclass. Rather so long as you act with the table, move privately but as part of a middleclass collective you are guaranteed zero risk because the Bank of international settlements had decided to make it so by placing States in the audit position of infinite grandeur for over leveraged private mortgages. It’s a bit like a privatised version of an IMF bail out mediated by the banking system. It says so long as enough of the middle class and upper middleclass are in a massive enough debt risk of default you will have it be paid off by the Sovereign State though cuts and taxes. The risk was the possible political fallout for the middleclass if people, figured this out in time. So first the 2010 coalition tory dominated government went into austery which allowed and afforded the poorest people being set against each other over the crumbs eg its set up dilemmas of low paid workers verse unemployed, old verse young and so on. This was effectively followed from the left by generating a new set of dilemmas between white and other races and men and other genders largely from an international point of view. This enabled certain arguments over not national but international justice arguments for mass immigration, and this in turn drove demand and allowed the prices of housing to carry on rising after flat lining from 2010 for few years.
We have been led by all parties and all institutions of all kinds into a series of false created dilemmas and internecine population conflicts, because all these dilemmas are incongruent and incommensurable, they do not make an image. Normally such irrational un-structures, would be subject to media Critique but they being the middleclass have just continued these projects and false dilemmas. What is called poplarism as a response is still locked into these false created dichotomies and not seeing the essence of what really happed and the origins: the who did it, of these artificial dilemmas? No one is held responsible for this and now we are asked about justice for people loosely descendant of people subjected to violence and poverty up to the middle of the industrial revolution. While this appears to be about race and ethnicity and retroactive justice it is really about hiding any talk of the middle class being made to pay it back. Like the analogy they must be trying to make is don’t think about the injustice of the 1990s 2000s, 2010’s against the non middle class, think about the injustice of slavery. Don’t think about having no house or the London middle class left and right think about domestic violence in the home.
Recommended reading J-F Lyotard “The Differend”.
1
-
1
-
1
-
B1: I've listened to most of the discussion now. There isn't an academic discipline or politics or ideology, that can be neutral or agnostic over the moments of this discussion. But here's the paradox: that of course means we must reflect on the primary area here of the discipline of history, or better multitude disciplines of history: Not just the multitudes gathered around the history of particular events on the past, but the multitudes of historians of all the other particular academic disciplines. That these multitude or manifold of productions/constructions/deconstructions can do this repeatedly without apparent end over a particular event, must contest not just to the ability to re- contextualise past events and their explanations and understandings, but to the fact that any event can be conceptualised in many ways: not just a true way verses a false or distorted or ideologically laden way; but that for any event of the past there is no end to the small details (facts) that previous historians have missed or some say, implying that historians have either done so out of a bad habits of interpretation and methodology and education but also with an agenda of their own, and so have missed big details that have silenced some voices, some histories/narratives. The important point to start with here is that this endless interpretation and re-interpretations of the past is possible at all. That is unless we have an historicist view of some kind, an ideology a priori if you will, this multitude and manifold activity will be endless. The historicist view was, and perhaps is, the idea that history, all the seemingly multitude of re-interpretations, are really to be understood as so many tokens or parts of a grand narrative say from Marx material view of history as determined ultimately by economics to a kind of historical naturalism that history is determined by race. These two views of the extreme left and extreme right, do recognise their view is in conflict with others, but that the others are just wrong or themselves ideologically determined even without the authors self knowledge through reflection and Critique. This is not just the recognition of bias, rather the historicist sees themselves as correct on the iron laws of real history, and so they serve as the Criteria and standard of truth and interpreting, that can name others as biased by its standard. Of course then we have a classic conflict between the extreme left and the extreme right, which as Lyotard points out is really two claims and standards of totalities in a life and death Homeric Struggle. In this facts usually embedded within quite different disciplines to history, are marshalled in favour of one or the others ideology narrative, they are produced often then interdisciplinary now by armies of PhD students and academics, to the point where the use of a non historical discipline for history, can result in products that go to undermine the original integrity and method of that discipline. You help historians use radiological technologies to uncover some aspect of the past and then later they apply this and historical method to the history of radiological technologies.
That kind of move has the effect of trying to use radiological data as facts in the first moment and then reflectively showing that that data is really subordinated to prior economic conditions or racism in its history of selecting human subjects for experiments to develop the frame for those radiological facts. This is not to confuse say "Someone was exposed to high levels of radiation" with "Someone was exposed to a narrative of high level radiation". At least in the last sentence "exposed" must have a different meaning here or used analogically or just taken out of its original meaning context. "Exposed" in the first sentence seems to imply a purely material causal relation, while in the second "exposed" means something like to be brought under an ideological view point via a narrative that fails to recognise its own historical conditions of genesis. Of course anyone familiar with radiation measurement knows the simple causal story is wrong, there are facts but schematised by the technical activity of detection and a lot of axiomatic mathematical structure to project anything like an apparent real detection of a causal event here. The second view would ask why and for who was radiation began as an area of study in physics and chemistry. This doesn't have to deny the causal fact as such, rather it invites a methodological and subject shift. That is if radiation work began from curiosity then applied in medicine and then moved to nuclear weapons and then nuclear power, then the existence of facts here without these contexts come into question. we might say if there was no political economic advantage or necessity then radiation would be a little understood area of nature now. So this means not so much a rejection of facts as an invitation to realise there are infinite areas in the realms of nature, some of which for political or economic reasons have not being explored: unknown unknowns, as opposed to some known unknown such as the quantum changes in energised Cobalt in the realm of current radiation studies.
1
-
B2: This then is not a conflict between facts on the one side verses ideologically driven cherry picking on the other. The “facts” have their historical conditions of emergence, and reflection on history and its facts, will present more facts about the place time person and context of discovery. These really mark not just different epistemologies of pure empiricism verses idealist contextualisations, but two mutual movements, the one more focused on details and perhaps the myth of a pure fact, the other more focused on context and interpretation, that risks when its method is applied back to its to itself of incoherence, since this cannot be classed as a bias since no independent real or ideal exists. In a way the ideological totalities of historicisms are trying to close down the freedom of interpretations under a single narrative for everything, while the positivist historical is trying to close down Critical contextualisation.
I think there are very few historians that would be one or the other. Rather it better to view this not as a conflict of extreme attempts to fix what can be said from opposite sides, but as two contrasting but mutually interdependent activities. One to seek the details on what is already know about events, the other to look at a wide and longer context to interpret the fact within, rather than just saying its false. The context of discovery and the context of justification then are not opposed, but mutual. From discussion with my Kant supervisor many years ago on the regulative ideas it was suggested, and I was persuaded, that Kant did not just mean the grand synthesis of a totality but also the focus on minute detail were both to be regulative over knowledge and action.
Action and agency though has been somewhat neglected by these two view over time, the facts approach became loaded with behaviourists accounts of action (C G. Hemple’s nomological approach by analogy with physical laws) and the hermeneutical Critical approach became loaded by analysis and interpretations of institutions their rules particularly legal and economic institutions and their origins and supposed real purposes. Here historical method is more akin to socio cultural and anthropology work and methods. Both are presented as grounds for the legitimacy of the other, in this the positivist attempts to collect all facts and determine laws of causation between all them, and the later searches for an overarching totality frame for all possible facts. But in both the role of the agent their understanding their action and so really the sense of an historical event at all tendentiously disappears. That is the double regulative method above will reduce and eliminate as a matter of methodology any role for a understanding limited subject and agent of action. The Hero and Villain both are subjected to the two regulative Principe of knowledge and eliminated for proximate causes and or grand totalising forces.
Both these views were attacked simultaneously by Donald Davidson in his discussions of Action and Agency with respect to both Hemple and the Wittgensteinan Social theorist Peter Winch, and both were attacked by existentialists and the original hermeneutic approach which took Heidegger’s human Being in their interpretive finitude and freedom in context as constitutive of history and events. That is on the one hand in any historical moment there are judgements and choices and particular reasoned actions, by agents that make a difference. That is not so much a difference between the real fact and its the perception by agent or the difference of an anomalous move in a supposed completed closed totality, rather these two opposed regulative ideas are in paly always and only from within a history understood as laden by human agency and human action. That is if we try with the two regulative methods to begin as if from a non human standpoint outside of meaning and history, we can make sense of nothing. The regulative idea then are not really seeking minute facts or totalities as this would mean no agents, rather these regulative ideas must begin within the subject and agency and meaning of action, and so to a limits of say finding obscure facts of the past that could have no role in any actor and action especially medieval ones that would require an agent then to have radiological apparatus and institutions and enlightenment science. This must be the case too for grand narratives like does it really make sense to say the British should have kept hold of a middle eastern country in the early 20th century because Uranium was there, and its very valuable now.
1
-
B 3: What the agent catered view can explain is how people made judgments and decisions, clearly we must say the 17th century Witches were burned because of belief in witches, but we know now this belief is wrong, but it is impossible to explain the act without the false belief, indeed the name Witch and the referents are so dependent. That is curious for realists and idealists, because they have to be able to place the error with the interpretation. The question is how? Now they might say there are known scientific facts of nature now and known facts of social cultural extreme ideological movements in times of crisis, but these are then said as “real” not with respect to the historical event and its contemporary interpretations a synchronic difference of agent perception and reality but a diachronic difference between concepts and reference and understanding at the historical time and the present. A dialogue now about the past must be a dialogue now “with” the past. Just as it is a mistake to try and have histories without human agents and their understanding, so it is a mistake to try and have a histories that attempt to escape the present and its authors and institutions and cultures and understandings. In this reorientation (Kant and Heidegger “what is orientation in thinking”) the regulative ideas then are not really seeking bare “fine grained” facts bellow any possible agents subliminality, or seeking the ultimate sublime whole, rather both these are really methods to remain within historical agents and the present agent disclosures and reflections reflect on, is from here: not for a realist contrast in the past between contemporary agent unknowable factual reals and the agents so called limited distorted biased vision of states of affairs. Error and so choice and action must be contrasted to the present as a criteria of limited Critique. A Criteria that presents the antinomy not as solved but made paradoxical. For we then have to ask in reflection about the status of our own best knowledge’s. That status belongs to events in the past and if agency and freedom were genuinely open to actors in the past then the present is so conditioned by a inexpressible possible other action by agent in the past. The classic time travel paradox that the time traveller kills their own grandparents, becomes a limit not defined by a factual event going one particular way but the space of meaning and understanding that connects the present necessarily to the past and certain facts of action. These facts have a strange place they are by one criteria contingent (on the agents free judgement), and so could have been otherwise, on the other hand they are what Foucault called from Kant “the historical a priori”. These are not contrasted as de facto/de jure though for the de facto is through its own de jure and the de jure is subject to its preceding de facto event. Again though we see attempts to construct some kind of totality here to do the old job of realism through totality. The de jure type job then now is obtained by synchronic data of economic distributions compared to some contemporary notion of justice in distribution. The idea of justice in distribution in part from Rawls, makes the standard for judgements on past acts by projecting diachronically that act but to the contemporary synchronic now called unjust distribution. What is left out then is any understanding of what a different act might have being possible could look like rationally in its context, and then the neglected but necessary problem of projecting a counterfactual possible to the present indeed this is impossible for any length of time. The very idea of such a hypothetical itself rests on the misapplication of the idea of a whole say justice having even a “place in its whole for a counterfactual otherwise history. My point is not just that the present whole determines past factual necessity, but rather is that deviation from justice now is incongruent to deviation form action facts in the past. It’s a kind of bad analogy at work or the attempt to conflate two pictures. We cannot make current metric spaces of justice and injustice now the criteria for error and action evaluation in the past. While the present is conditional on some past events, in an ordinary way of thinking, the present cannot project its criteria of justice back on past actions to distinguish right from wrong actions.
1
-
B4: In any event, systems of justice now determined by distribution change are projections of policy processes forward. So even here it is action not metric reshuffling of the people according to synchronic ideas of instantaneous structural change, rather its projected distribution shifts over time that is imagined forward. So the purely intellectual intuition of total quantity change here is incongruent to any possible action excepting God perhaps. I’m not here throwing Plato out for Aristotle rather that a Platonic notion of time (shared perhaps with Augustine and Spinoza) is in error as a transport of the Criteria of error.
What I think might have gone wrong with the left lies in its own recent history. It really began its public entry from literary studies and Derrida. What was easy to do to a text just swapping over names and terms in accord with Derrida view of privileging and deconstruction and so on, was transposed to the social cultural world directly. They had the misfortune to apply methods suited to textual critique of literature, structural word re arrangement in accord with difference, and imagine this basic orientation could translate or be transported to the real social world by laws. Again this neglects context now and context in the past. A neglect not just for structuralist and post structuralists, but early analytical Philosophy from Frege and the test of name substitution and truth preserving. Again Frege takes up the human as organism as a whole but says little else about it. It’s there in Leibnitzs “notion” which is also forgotten for the metaphysical mathematical logic structure he seeks. All our post enlightenment work seems to be trying to either get rid of the agent or re-describe the agent in not just transcendent notion of justice in the polis but in purely academic and medical work eg as a behaviourists might. This is explored by Foucault and Lyotard. They wanted to de-thrown the privileged thinking and practices of medical science like psychology, in their view that they have a grasp on the good life eudiamonia for all. In this there attack reminds me of Popper’s Criticism of positive freedom in two concepts of liberty. But now with the left more in institutional power, they have replaced the agent instructed with the “good life” with transcendent justice. But now psychology is all in, in this, in detecting so called perceptual bias and error, and correcting it with emphasis on behavioural reconditioning and linguistic re-structuring. Psychology under justice then has not some teleological good end as its agents and so societies aim, but teleological justice as the aim and the “good” of the patents and the world as the means.
But now we come to another paradox, that the study of history itself as a history. There is as well discussed by historians such as and Simon Sharmer, the understanding that historical views on the past change with the present. Some in an idealist mode might claim the present makes the past eg from my discussion above. Indeed they have recently re-published a number of late nineteenth early 20th century History of Philosophy books. Its revealing to note how many of those, books view philosophy as more connected to culture literature and the arts. Even upto the second world war there are histories of philosophy that make no mention of the turn of the century scientific mathematical logic turn in philosophy. They are probably written by philosophers at the end of their career as a kind of reflection, and so they probably had the fortune to be too early in the game to have to get onto the new logical positivism. Indeed I heard that after World War Two only Collingwood of the old school returned to academia. Which meant the young guns were left to their ahistorical analytical revolution from Hegel with no one left to oppose them, or remind them of important stuff from the past. Indeed in Europe by contrast philosophy become much more concerned with literature and the arts and history after World War Two and Heidegger. For example Sartre’s work along with some writers projected an aesthetic existentialism (see Walter Kaufmann’s collection and I think Jorden Person has taken this up too).
1
-
B5: But these returns to history were meant as moves against Hegelianism too, achieved by taking Heidegger’s destruction of Western metaphysics and so deconstructing Western Capitalism via philosophy. This embraced a structuralism image of radical substitutional change but in the present and by degree working with the material base Deleuzse, the Platonic image of justice in law Derrida, and Foucault as the tactician of power and affordance in rules and norms in a context. Together they make up a kind of political whole in process at least in terms of their references. This has to be a position that recognises human freedom in a situation, even if the notions of an author here has all but disappeared, and with it responsibility. “All for one”, and no one responsible. But now in some institutional power they seems to have become Hegelians again. With an end purpose that is justice and equality for all, and an historicism that seeks out facts and ideas to further these projects. Interestingly and revealing is that this has been accompanied by projects of giving voice to the silenced people of the past the marginalised the minorities. This at once draws on Hegel’s conflict thesis about the self and other in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” and uses this on the one hand to Critique or de legitimise de justify any claims to epistemic facts and grand narratives and ideas, but at once takes the first person reports as given.
That is what began as expanding the voices of historical narratives like the voices or writings of previously unheard witnesses to history, we get the experience of the ordinary Soldier in World War Two, but then institutionally networked and interdisciplinary academic work links this to psychology of first person talk and then to the law and so a new assemblage is formed and MeToo happens for example in this context it is not brutal and spontaneous at all. But the figure of a sovereign agent must be difficult to fix in this justice orientated world whole aim. That is that person can never to a just act, any act in an event will be unjust wrt to some or many justice metrics. Even having cup of tea while dominating to charity will be unjust in the whole. A similar problem of error and fact and justice and the good as we find in history is here in the person in action. They are persons doomed to injustice. A strange identity, to go along with what the large scale gender and race and ethnicity justice metrics make of real people in real interactions in events. These are incongruent inconsistent and contradictory they split up people into parts along the lines of mass world identities data, all that can be left is tactics and strategic manoeuvres, the people are subsumed under the political aims directed at institutions change and via more people change they see as Hegelian enemies. It’s ironic the left talked endlessly about personal feelings and speaking out, but really this and the subjects are a means and tool only for the justice and equality.
1
-
B6: I now intended to talk about John Sallis on Hegel’s phenomenology preface. There Salis claims that Hegel was well aware that in his own historical work his own ideas there are themselves subject to their time and change just as he had done this to the history of philosophy. Really modern history comes from Hegel and his opponents who critiqued him. Hegel’s mate Schelling wrote the first History of philosophy book, and Schlegal I think wrote the history of the 30 Years War. They claim a tendentious history of progress, though stages, of the rise of civilisation and modernity. Governed by conceptual laws error and chance change have no life no teleology of action apart from being attracted by in the bright light of evolutionary progress for the future. Even the 20th century detractors were forced into either material causal laws like Marx, or contrast Hemple and liberal but externally materiality determined economic marginality historians. Then there is von Misses Kantian a priori schema of supply and demand and so on.
I suppose I’m meant now to reach a conclusion. But like a billy Connelly Joke there isn’t necessarily one in the offing. I wanted here to just kind of make a grand picture or sketch of the basic positions and their historical developments, and how I see certain aspects of them as fitting together or as ad hoc assemblages that are really bad analogies and incongruent overlays. I guess there is a point though and what could properly be an historical account even an historical account of historical accounts without a purpose. I think I’ve said that to try and remove history from people, and purposes is to fall into the above sort of errors. Or rather the above sorts of errors create the myth of there being no people of note, no one can make a difference. In this of course, if you know your “history of history” or your “philosophy of the history of philosophy” or the “history of the philosophy of history”, then looks a lot like the Great Men theory of history the 19th and 20th century wanted to ditch from both the left and the right for sciences of cause and even just as random facts as aggregated or history as teleology. Put it this way part of what I am trying to do here is warn against setting up the wrong political oppositions you are after I think, though a poor orientation to the cosmology by a the wrong or a crumpled up image of cosmological oppositions. For example I don’t believe opponents of the left ought to be looking for a all-white all male identity project of conflict this is to occupy or rent or squat in a place the left have left open specifically for you. Its obvious practically that having a mass solidarity representation of millions in the streets protesting against the left would only be what Lenis called a revolt not a revolutions. The difference here is the revolutions has the years of intellectual and technical work behind it, was already embedded in the institutions had the competence to run these institutions. The street protests as effective is the icing on the cake rally a tip of an ice burg. I mean is there such an equality that men could do the same MeToo movement against women? No way, but why not. Aristotle said it is as unjust to treat unequal people equally as it is to treat equal people unequally.
1
-
B7 I haven't seen the Napoleon movie yet, so thank you for telling us that a lot of it is just untrue. Also and untrue, true story is one thing, but not another biopic that centres around a love affair, and places makes what they are famous for at the margin and the love interest at centre. Is this still the: Schopenhauer/Darwin/Freud interpretation of history i.e. its all really about sex? Or do we still think that to get women even into a Napoleon movie let alone to enjoy the experience, that there has to be a Romantic theme, or cynically that's the Napoleonic Wars were really all about the woman in his life.
Alternativity the movie purpose is to teach not by downloading an interpretation composed of truths onto the audience that like a blank slate just passively absorbs it. Rather history and interpretation is not passive but reflective. The thing is now everybody can go onto the internet and easily fact check it. That though makes it seem odd that Scot would make a movie of falsehoods when it so easy to check them. Indeed I imagine the falsehoods would be publicly exposed pretty quickly on social media. So a movie of falsehoods could get away with it pre-internet, but not now. That seems paradoxical for a director to do that now. Maybe the way out of the paradox is not say bad script bad director, but rather that they are working within the very knowledge that people will easily fact check . This means people will have an active interpretative relation to the movie not a passive one of taking on a representation. That means the movie purpose is to engage the audience in reflection and Critique, by using the contrast available to them of the truth claims in the movie verses the claims on Wikipedia and YouTube documentaries and of course even those, so last millennium hold outs: books. That is the movie is made within the knowledge of the new internet fact checking ability of the general audience not just historians. its purpose is to get the audience to critique and reflect not give them an image of the true.
Indeed i have become aware in the last few years, that movies are made in the full knowledge and assumption people can and will watch them more than once. So the script themes can do a kind of democratic version of Shakespeare's technique. So I'm told Shakespeare wrote plays that said at one level something to the lower classes and at another level something to the upper classes, at the same time. So these movies operate at two levels, but not distinguished by two classes at the same time, but by, potentially, or possibly, the same class having the capacity and capability to reflect and compare and repeat over time. Here the time and repetition in one class over time can make a similar disclosure difference to two classes watching the movie. However the difference of interpretations between two classes at the same time, is not the same difference as between the true and the false unless we take it that the facts easily accessible on line are the upper class view point on facts. that is the internet just contains the view point of the middleclass on true not objective or independent passive truth.
Also this account above would have to be reversible i think. That is: are their meaning and truths the lower classes access the upper class cannot. You know the line "money can buy you anything except poverty". Now the task would be for the middle class to take time to come to the lower class understandings. I think following Andrew Roberts that would be a movement over time of the upper and middle classes listening to the recipients of their institutional truth projects. this too is accessible to the middleclass online over time but they seem to choose to demonise this as "risks of social media", unless useful to their instituional projects of course. There's a lot more interesting ontological metaphysical and epistemological issues at play here. But put it this way it seems obviously intentional, Ridley Scott clearly did this with Alien way back in 1979. Its like the film was made for and in the knowledge that people would watch it over and over again on video they knew was coming. i watched that movie many times but it was Rob Ager of Collective Learning that led me to watch it again and again until a new story comes into view because you start to put all the bits together and get a different picture. Rob Ager discloses some but leaves much work to be done by the audience, he highlights things but does not present the meaning its left to you to figure it out.
There is also a long tradition of this going back to Orson Welles Mercury Theatre Radio Play "War of the Worlds".( Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" album from 1978 is being performed as a musical on tour in the UK March April with Liam Neeson as narrator)
Also it seems clear to me that Oliver Stone's JFK is like this. I mean there are errors, made up stuff, and the use of the aesthetic of narrative to lead the audience to a mesmeric passivity of representation. The tag line and the breaking of the fourth wall is not: this is the truth of the assassination, but "do your own research".
The Oscar for triggering the audiences out of passivity though musty go to "Joker" and what a break in the fourth wall that was.
This ought to motivate a reading of Hans George Gadamer on hermeneutics "Truth and Interpretation". Also Paul Richour "Ones Self as Another" He discusses the analytic tradition on agency (Davidson and Strawson) as well as usign the phenomenological method. Or maybe the phenomenological method requires him to do so, cross over disciplines.
A great discussion thank you Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs and Andrew Roberts (Lord Roberts).
1
-
Part B8(i): I just want to add a couple of notes.
Firstly my argument above I introduced via the historical a priori from Foucault (and before him Simmel's Geisteswissenschaften (1905 (1977)) see R. Lanier Anderson "The Debate over the Geisteswissenschaften" in Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870-1945 (Ed. Thomas Baldwin 2012), could be framed from my context as between "agent" subjectivity verses "realism". I am maintaining or conserving a view, in vision thought and action, that this contrast cannot be accounted for by making the "real" here something either beyond the agents reason or grasp in thought and action. My example of this kind of philosophical metaphysical ontological error accounting for or as a realist criteria for, or about, epistemological error as limitation, was say setting up the subjective verse real as a contrast between agent subjective finitude and a best current scientific account. While current science and technology can tell us things about a battle that would be of use to Napoleon had he known, such an artificially imagined and substituted knowledge taken from the present to the past could not possibly be the distinction between what Napoleon knew and what he could and should have known or considered. A modern weather report for example. The subjective limit of finitude and the real is not then contrast between temporal finitude and science as best progressing tracking of world as universal law i.e. as tracking eternity in contrast to temporality. that this temporality eternity model for error is wrong is most obvious in action, if we imagine taking our knowledge now and going back to 1806 France. You cannot take a computer or a tank back (let alone knowledge of the events of 1806) so if you say lets put the data in a computer that's impossible, or you say lets get a tank division, that's impossible. The contrast for Napoleon must be immanent to his time.
Now i think i get to this not just form the historical a priori in Foucault, but via work on Kant's "refutation of idealism" argument. So on this J. Bennett in "Kant's Analytic" makes the point that the real their is a the necessary fixity of "fact" in the past from revision for agent self-consciousness in time to be possible. Now P. Guyer claims that time cannot be viewed as a already there subjective or objective container for experience of objects to happen in. He says "there is no ticking clock on the edge of consciousness", but what there is of course is time (and place) stamped historical events and this allows us to bring together different narratives assuming a shared time measurement. I used to know an evolutionary geologist who told be the dating process uses multiple scientific methods many from physics, to construct many time lines each of which is finite , but that then can be made to overlap and produce a continuous time sequence or series spanning millions of years. There is no need for the position of Wittgenstein's interlocuter's "one continuious thread".
My argument might remind some of McDowell's argument rejecting a scientific realism performing a similar role in "Rule Following and Non-cognitivism" in his critique of this sort of distinction in ethics.
I think i am also influenced here by Wittgenstein's criticism of James Frazier's Golden Bough that proposes a realist scientific account as the demythologised real under the myths of the past. these anachronistic imaginings are too weak to have the imaginative power of action (see Berkeley on the limits on power of the imagination to make a real). the subjective verse real is really the finite context verses an ideal of the context as an immanent horizon, that is all.
This is of course part of an argument against the enlightenment disenchantment of the world and with Sellars Critique of the "scientific image of man".
The point is in time travel movies and imaginings we have only the limited power to take one thing back like a person in a machine. This would be then an analogy with taking one abstracted object in one abstract time (linear function) out of the multi time synthesised object and so appearing as if an referable object in that one abstracted time narrative dimension. This would imply not just no need for synthesis in grasping it but also that it would come to us as if a one dimensional time line or series that was pre synthetic or real (this is drawing particularly on the McDowell/Crispin Wright and others debate over rule following). This is what scientific realism claims to be able to do: take an abstracted object out of the synthetic manifold that takes with it a single non synthetic time series and then drops its time series and enters a new times series in the past. The point is if we take Kant seriously on the synthetic unity of the manifold as multiple simultaneous syntheses of time already in play in play, then the abstraction of one object in its own synthetic series is impossible. That’s before even its attempted insertion into a past time series manifold.
Now if this abstract object in its abstract time series is the metaphysics of transcendent scientific realism, the “transcendent” here is really a “decendence” from the synthetic manifold manifold in the imagination, to the imagined myopic abstract object in its abstract given time series as if all the others can be dropped and it still be referable by a mind. This kind of erred move in action allows the imagination to take a single rule in abstract from a manifold of rules and then use it not as a limit “in” determination”, but an affordance for determination. That is using one abstract rule is like one abstracted from synthesis time series. Judgement is not a: brining an object under single rule, an abstract object under a single abstract rule. Rather judgement is within synthesis within the manifold, it is this manifold that makes judgment as such possible. For bringing a case under a single rule is not a judgement it is not determining or limiting it becomes a mere tool for an imagined already there determined action. That is my view is determination is not a negative space to reference and action but constitutive of it. Anyone who knows Kant’s first Critique will know that Kant’s argument here w.r.t. time also is projected to dealing with space. I put the contrast as that between laws of nature and natural law. Interesting geopolitical revisions then would become appropriate.
I could put it in a nut shell and say from travel to be really possible the whole world of the present would have to be transported to the whole world of the past. What the abstraction really might look like is not a delivery of tanks for Napoleon but a whole lot of photographs of tanks.
1
-
1
-
Part B8(iii) It should be clear my position on Kant and idealism rejects both: contemporary science as laws of nature, even as an ideal telos or regulative enterprise project; and contemporary natural law as either an ideal or telos project, to make the distinction for the human subject between subjectivity and objectivity. Indeed these are both Hegelian attempts to return to transcendent metaphysics that Kant rejects. For Hegel and Hegelains this is counter Kantian Copernican Revolutiuon is called speculative reason. It can ground in universal science and universal law progressive process and telos. The two are linked for universal science project requires a universal institutional structure and law to travail, and universal law as an array of ought’s and ought not’s has to uses science, in its various multiplicity’s as the de-personalised explanation of failure to abide by the law, and the method to get people behavioural to abide by the law. Law abidance here in Hegel though is now made mysterious. The deep 2nd millennial problem is how the space of virtue and vice is made into various separate categories and named, even given images of Angles and Demons in the middle-ages (see The Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (Rossell Hope Robins (1959/1967)). This erred abstraction of virtue and vice then sciences of virtue and vice gave the appearance that law with its “Being in accord” and “Being out of accord” then as also apparent separable abstractions, was isomorphic with character as separable abstract objects. This I believe is what Mary Shelly might have been grasping at in Frankenstein, it certainly appears as a paradoxical theme in most of the Hammer Frankenstein films of the mid 20th century.
Now I’m revisiting J-F Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition”, “Just Gaming” and “The Differend”. My vague recollections from doing a coup-le of weeks reading group on them 20 years ago was that Freud was one of Lyotard’s major targets for the accusation of meta-narrative. But there are only a few mentions of Freud there and even less for Napoleon. I’m only a few pages in by following the index his Lyotard does view the problem with Freud as one of abstraction and mis substation he also references as I have in this connection Frege here too (The Differend ##76,77). Now at some point Lyotard mentions Napoleon “having kidney trouble” (I can’t find the page now). This I think is meant to refer to some analytic examples for similar philosophical problems over definitions and essences and accounts of nature. However if we watch the new Napoleon movie, with the movie “Gothic” about Mary Shelly writing Frankenstein during a stormy weekend at Lake Geneva with Shelly, Byron and others, a Freudian would assume Napoleon really wanted to be Byron, and Byron really wanted to be Napoleon. Their actions then would be considered as the transport of an insoluble abstraction into a soluble domain. Transference: Byron becomes the great poet, Napoleon the great artillery Emperor.
1