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i actually have found the thread interesting, but hadn't really felt that i had much to add beyond the two posts i put up at the start. i read through the thread yesterday, objected to knife missle's strange use of aristotle--i was going to lay out more of it, but things got derailed. but the thread is still of interest to me, and i need a break from a work project, so here i am again.
1. on pascal's wager: the trick of that passage is rhetorical--for it to function, you have to allow yourself to be pushed around by the narrator--and in the section, as throughout the pensées, there are two, the believer and the skeptic. the wager presupposes that the believers framing of the question is compelling: this IS your situation, you MUST choose.
on that, the problem is pretty obvious, even though pascal is a great writer and his writing makes as strong a case for the power of his argument as can be made: but in the end, if you accede to the frame, you are trapped in a christian way of modelling reality.
the interesting thing is the other part of the wager. paraphrasing:
skeptic: ok, i accept the probability argument but am made so that i still cannot believe. what should i do?
believer: act as though you believe, perform the rituals, dscipline the passions, and eventually you will become like an animal (a variant of "be like unto a child") and will forget that you do not believe.
so you have an argument for auto-conditioning.
the source of what you believe is what you repeat.
so belief follows from repetition, not the other way around.
belief is an effect, not a cause.
repetition wears down mediations (distancing), blurring them into background conditions.
belief, a kind of immediacy, becomes possible on that basis--of the erasure of the sense of being in a mediated situation (i believe because of the probabilities) through repetition, which issues into a space of immediacy.
faith is immediacy---it is the inverse of the sense of being-mediated.
this is why i have not been able to decide what to make of the wager.
if pascal believed this scenario to be true, and if the point of the pensées is to foster faith, then it seems to me it would be the last thing he would say explicitly.
this because it reveals the device--repetition--and by doing that reduces nearly to zero the possibility that it can have the desired effect.
or it stretches the space of repetition out much longer than it otherwise would be, because now you not only have to forget that you do not believe, but you also have to forget that you know the device that is going to bring you to the point of forgetting you do not believe.
from this one of the points of this post: i think one thing that differentiates those who believe from those who do not is the level of awareness of belief as socially situated, as something that unfolds and an effect within particular institutional situations.
i dont think it follows from any intrinsic superiority of one frame of reference over another, as if there is some sort of objective meta-scale that certain people have access to and others do not that enables judgments to be made as to which style of belief is close to "reality" and which is not.
all aspects of being-in-the-world are frame contingent.
all the variables stipulated within a given frame, and all the rules that enable combination and variation, move together. you criticize people operating within one frame on the basis of positions articulated within another. what might differentiate frame b from frame a is that from a viewpoint informed by b you can be aware of the extent to which positions within frame a are effects of certain parameters--rituals, assumptions, institutions, etc,..
but this does not at all mean that frame b does not itself work in the same basic way, using different organizing signifiers and different rules for combination etc.---it just means that frame b presupposes a certain distance from frame a and that one effect of that distance is that if you play in b you can sociologize a. that's it.
this sets up the possibility of a regress of frames. what enables evaluation past a certain obvious point is the openness of particular ways of thinking about being-in-the-world to recursive operations. recursion/reflexivity becomes the only way of generating evaluations of the frame within which you operate, of making arguments about it, of making judgments about its effects--there IS NO OBJECTIVITY, there are only frames of ideological reference that let you do some operations while excluding others.
reflexivity is not easy. philosophy is a field of inquiry that gives you ways to develop reflexivity, to structure it, with the idea of maybe using it as a set of tools that enable you to situate yourself and how you see the world around you as functions of the particular ideological contexts that FOR YOU are immediate because they are yours.
this is important because the cognition is largely social and that means that this problem of one's imbrication in ideological frames of reference does not stop. you see this problem all over in scientific ideologies, and in pseudo-philosophies that lean on them more often than not in wholly naive ways. this bring sme back around to the atlan book i referenced in post 19 or something, which outlines this issue by looking at the problematic fit between types of scientific inquiry--for example that of molecular biology with that of what he refers to as macro-molecular biology--the problem is that of integrating scales of analysis--the underlying problem is created by epistemological assumptions---which scientific inquiry is shot through with, as are all other forms of human thinking.
whence the problem i had with the notion that philosophy is bullshit.
but wait, there is more--on the problematic notion of metaphysics that is floating about in this thread--but i need to do some more work and so am stopping here.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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