The Philosopher's Attic

There are no missed chances in life, only a perspective guided by regret sees something lost in an unrealised act that is pure potentiality.

At one moment or another in our lives we come to that point where we get that nagging feeling of having missed a chance. It can be anything from meeting someone who could have helped us to missing out on a wonderful bargain to the big chances of a new job perspective or a life changing experience. In deliberation we always work with that unity of ‘a chance to…’ and when we weigh the pros and cons of a decision, there’s always that player called ‘a missed chance’ that we measure up and calculate our future luck with. It instils dread, fear even, that idea that we could miss our on something. Something different, something new, something that is potentially so many things.

There is no such thing as a missed chance.

I am aware that this is a rather bold statement, some might even find it plain wrong, others might be revolted by it, because they are so used to that idea.

The truth of the matter however is that the truly missed chances are extremely rare. Much rarer than we’d think.

What is a chance? And when is it really gone? When have we truly missed it?

There are so many good words on how you have to make your own chances, how you need to seize the moments that across the history of human through have drizzled down on us until they form a certain pressure that puts us on edge, turned towards the future constantly waiting for that chance, or turned towards the past constantly analysing our decisions and separating them into ‘missed chances’ and ‘used chances’.
Life isn’t that straight forward and if a chance came with a clear label, which fool would walk by it and miss it on purpose?

If we analyse the concept of a ‘chance’, then one element becomes apparent rather quickly: a chance is never empty. It’s a chance to act, to do something. Thus it is always like to a certain theory of action. A second element is that a ‘a chance’ almost always leads to a decision. Obviously by it being linked to action, the decision mostly is about doing one thing or another and that leads to the third element which is change. There rarely is a ‘chance’ that does not involve some degree of change.

But the concept of chance is just a short way of stating a situation. It’s an abbreviation. For what ?

If we look a bit closer a the first element stated above, then we quickly realise that action requires assessment: action cannot be done without aim, goal or orientation. That’s what differentiates action from actionism, doing for doing’s sake. What is left out in the way we use ‘a chance’ in our deliberations today is the second part of the equation of reality: doing one thing means not doing something else.
Put this way, the ‘missed chance’ gets back its true value of a moment of decision and with that value, it isn’t any different from any other decision. The added value of change most often veils that fact. Even if in hindsight we are aware that we decided on one thing rather than on another, at the moment of decision, the fear of missing something, missing a chance, has the dangerous quality of making us miss that fundamental second part. In hindsight we barely see the chance anymore, focused on the decision. But that is only one kind of ‘missed chances’.
Another kind is the one we only see in hindsight. And aren’t these the most bitter ones? The moments when we go back and analyse and think that we make a wrong choice, thus missing that elusive thing that was a chance.
Both visions are askew and limiting. An old motto states that we are our decisions. Put in front of the backdrop of the above analysis, this suddenly becomes a true statement. Every single decision, may we qualify it through our vision on time as good or bad, shapes the here and now, the person that we are now and thus also said vision on our past. The smallest change would change the person that we are today and it also would change our vision on the past and so forth. This basic reality takes on a prominent role in the rather popular rules of time travel and its paradoxes. (Cf. the concept of the butterfly effect in chaos theory and its use in pop culture such as The Butterfly Effect [movie] or in time traveller Hiro’s story arc in Season 6 of  the TV series Heroes )
But in everyday life, where we don’t go back in time to change our lives or the lives of others, to shape ourselves to our own wishes, all we’re left with is the future and while our mind is so tempted to turn back and divide our decisions into good ones and bad ones, into missed chances, misfortunes, missed encounters and mistakes.

I’ve stated that there is no such thing as a missed chance. Usually self-examination, understanding our actions, serves the purpose of learning which then ultimately should lead to avoiding mistakes or repeating bad behaviour. In the case of a ‘missed chance’ such introspection falls flat, because there is not an iota that is changeable about it, or it wouldn’t be a ‘missed chance’.

Everything that is based on the concept of ’seizing or using that chance’ and its twin of ‘missing a chance’ is next to useless as a lesson. The same chance can never present itself and we can’t go back. All that a self-analysis of that nature accomplishes is that it makes living with our decisions that much harder. This is particularly the case since we only ever consider our failures that way. Nobody ever sees a positively missed chance at misfortune for instance. This is reinforced by the nature of pure potentiality of the so called ‘missed chance’. In truth, we have no idea how the other decision could have turned out. It could have just as probably led to disappointment as ‘missing the chance’ could have led us to happiness. It’s our visions from the present that accounts for that. Be are further along the way when we do an introspection and analyse our past, have understood more, have experienced more and that lets us have a clearer view so to speak. Using that clearer view and more knowledge to devalue our own decisions however can only ever lead to a bitter consideration of ourselves and our past.

I would advocate for trust rather than a chance. Trust in ourselves. That we make our decisions to the best of our knowledge at the time and that they are the deep expression of our reality. That we do what we can to lead a sound life. Turning ourselves constantly towards the past, reminiscing about what would have been the better choice, not only blocks the present, but ultimately scares us to stand up to the future.

yseult The Odd Philosophical Question

Silence and creativity are linked and if we manage to free the one with the aid of the other, we might not just become better artists or better ‘creators’, but also we might achieve better understanding of ourselves and the people we are hoping to reach.

One of my twitter contacts – Masafumi Matsumoto – is following the Artist’s Way at the moment and his insights on his blog on this experience are pretty revealing and a great read.
This week, he has issued a challenge to everyone who’s reading him and following him, to simply ‘not read’. One of the exercises of The Artist’s Way is to abstain yourself from reading for a week and observe the effect on your own creativity.
Now, the Artist’s Way is something that has become very popular in the mid-80ies and the synthesiser of this method Julia Cameron has opened the creative pathways for a lot of people with her method (which incidentally came from years and years of teaching courses with the same aim. In that the book differs a lot from other ’self-help’ or ’self-teaching’ books on writing, creativity, and artistic expression.) and with the rise of chatter of our everyday online and social life oversounding our creative selves from our, is as relevant as ever.

When I came across the Artist’s Way a couple of years ago, I struggled greatly with the ‘reading abstinence’ as an assignment. This was before the internet became more a means of communication and exchange, and still was a tool for research and the occasional replacement for a physical written letter.
Reading is an integral step in the construction of our shared social and personal realities. The universe we construct around ourselves and within us are made up of various kinds of building stones: reading is an integral part of the cement that link those stones. It’s not just the dialogical nature – explained best in Gadamer’s method in Wahrheit und Methode – of every text, but much more the witnessing a thought outside the confines of our own mind that hold these said building stones together. Without it, they become a wall that keeps us within our own reality and soon cannot be overcome by any argument or realisation. Or to say it differently: instead of stepping onto those building stones and looking ahead, we step down and dig ourselves into the ground and the building stones just become a wall keeping our gaze from the horizon.

While I still hold the above, coming back to the Artist’s Way – thanks to mma323 – and that famous week of reading abstinence I see the profound truth in Cameron’s exercise that I failed to before.
Because today I deeply feel that the overall chatter that surrounds us today has increased and continues to increase still. It’s suggested to us by a whole set of social pressures that we need to be efficient, constantly online, constantly reachable and constantly ’there’ or something is wrong with us. That pressure of efficiency then pushes us to fill every little minute between greater actions such as work or shopping etc. will said chatter. A quick check on your email here, a quick read through the latest headlines there and the small moment that could have served in silence to recollect ourselves and our thoughts is gone. This immediateness and the contraction of distances between people make for a rise in stress that can be remedied fairly easily. (Fairly easily, because recent studies concerning the peer pressure through Facebook et al. suggest that leaving the chatter for a while can actually harm your social contacts.)

But for what? In the Artist’s way, the goal is clear: to free your creative spirits and pathways, free yourself to write, draw, paint, express and in the end find yourself again. Web 2.0, where the emphasis lies on the exchange and the us, makes this even more important. Whereas our exchange on the web is based on the basic structure of ‘I transmit’ – ‘You comment’ – ‘We discuss/exchange etc.’, the Artist’s Way emphasieses a return to the ‘I do’ – ‘I create’.
In a way it goes back to the first step, before you share. Redefining ‘what’ you transmit on the Web and through the new media. Without that the content of what you want to share becomes vacant, empty and we then immediately start to fill it up with nonsensical self-production. We all do it. All the time.

So, maybe the lesson here isn’t just: stop reading, stop using this or that service, but rather: think about what you share and don’t lose yourself in it.

A reading abstinence certainly helps to get a clear idea of what we all consume on a regular basis. It also serves to give value back to what we really end up reading rather than being intellectually bulimic with our everyday intake of the written word. Because in the same way bulimia is disproportionate and leaves you without healthy nutrition, so is and overuse of the new means of the transmission of knowledge and opinion in the digital age.

Creating patches of silence in our lives will not only open up creative influences, but it will also give back value to our interactions and that in turn will lead us to a better understanding of each other, because only when we have the feeling that people are actually listening to what we have to say and not just quickly taking notice of it, can we assume the true basis of exchange and mutual understanding.

yseult communication creativity, silence, Writing

If Human Sciences, are not proper sciences, then where will we stop to devalue human thought and its history? Can you even argue with people who can only accept their own ground of discussion? Why the study of philosophy and thus thought, truly is the only science around.

This week a rather interesting and revealing discussion broke out on my Twitter Feed. The initial kick-off was given by a list of ‘The best 100 scientific Twitterers’ and a revised edition as a twitter list published by @terrorzicke (Name ist Programm – her nick is program).
As member of the Human Sciences, obviously, a friend of mine immediately asked why there were no philosophers (or Scientists in the Liberal Arts for that matter) to be found on her ‘scientific’ list. The crude and simple answer that she reinforced through the subsequent (heated) argumentation was, that Human Sciences are not sciences. (Best laughable tweet out of that discussion: “Geisteswissenschaften kreisen im Gegensatz zu den Naturwissenschaften im Grunde um sich selbst.”  “Human Sciences revolve – to the contrary of natural sciences – only around themselves”)

I won’t go into the depths of that lion pit. It’s pretty much useless to try and reason with people who allow themselves opinions on things they clearly have no idea of. It would be more interesting to try and reason with a cup of coffee. At least, if there is no response, you get a decent shot of caffeine out of it.
I’ll only put one thought out there and it’s one that becomes quite clear if you’ve ever interested yourself for neurological sciences.
There are a lot of ‘natural’ things out there that we can study and analyse in many different ways. The purely materialistic, descriptive way, being one of them – the purely scientific way in the above cited way of thinking. The analysis of the language in which this is made however would already be a ‘human scientist’ way of looking at things.
Without the ordering and the reflection of philosophy which goes beyond the raw material, all we would have is nothing more than a huge stack of information such as the colour red solicits a neuron fire with such and such intensity taking into account the context and situation. But how it is that we can reference that red, or what it means for a thing to be red (even though scientifically speaking the colour red doesn’t exist) which will then lead us to the problem of accidental properties as opposed to essential ones, the theory of individuation and personal identity and so forth… all these questions are philosophical ones and per the cited definition ‘not scientific’.

It is a common misconception that within the confines of Human Sciences anything goes. People from the outside think that we continuously weave our insignificant web of thoughts around a comfortable glass of wine and a good laugh within our own idiosyncratic language, pleasuring ourselves in our own brain juice.
‘Scientificity’ realises itself within the confines of a method. If the method is faulty, no physicist can work. Neither can a philosopher or a linguist or a literate. Far away is the concept that ‘anything goes’. You might gain great popularity among a certain crowd by being without a method (Derrida for instance), but the fame is temporary. (Not one of Derrida’s direct students is still working with his thought. Parts of his method of deconstruction – which isn’t a method truly – but not the complete version and for the next generation of students Derrida will be a relic, not a school anymore.)

As someone who edits texts that have never before seen a printed edition, texts that remain unheard and inaccessible for the scientific community of Medievalists, I work with quantifiable method and scientific means such as distribution, probability, semantic quantities etc. to near myself as closely as ever possible to the original text which is most cases is lost. If you imagine that for the more popular texts you have between 30 and 50 surviving manuscripts and thus potentially 30 to 50 different versions of a text, it becomes immediately apparent why the claim that this can’t by any means be considered science is laughable. Not only do I have to go through that very materialistic part of my work, but after years of that exploring the material support of the text in question (it’s just the characters and the vellum really), I then proceed to the interpretation of the text itself, trying to explain what it’s all about. And only in a third last step do I examine that theory against the ‘bigger picture’ (does it make sense in itself? does it apply to opponents at the time it was written? what do we learn from it in terms of overall realisation? etc.)
In my particular case, as Historians of Philosophy, we are the badly loved kid of all the departments. For the historians, we’re not really historians; for the philosophers, we’re not really philosophers and for the editors, we know way to much to gain quick money with us. Truth of the matter is: we are everything and nothing. We need to have all the instruments a historian needs, all the knowledge and methods a philosopher does and we need to have a decent technical approach to texts and their transmission through the ages. We do it all, and yet, nobody takes us seriously.
So, it’s been long that I have taken anybody for full who claims that this is not science.

In some definitions ‘science’ is defined by the fact that you open up new grounds or that you create the basis for thought and study. It’s clear that with my work, I do just that. Without text editions, our look on a certain period will always remain limited, because the huge cellars of the major libraries of Europe are filled will texts that have never been read by a larger public after the 16th century.

Interestingly enough of course, none of those arguments which my friend made in said Twitter debate were accepted. Neither were mine. To the question why the person was ignoring me in particular, it was said that ‘who protects their tweets doesn’t want to be heart’.

Now, that brings me to another small truth, this time about our modern means of communication. Today, we’re always supposed to be online, always supposed to be linked to that behemoth internet, and if we don’t reply immediately to an email or a text, something is clearly wrong. And yes, if you are stupid enough to protect your privacy because you want to know who is following you, you do not want to be heard.
Yes, I protect my updates, I also protect my Facebook profile, but because the majority of users have lost all sense of the truth that on the opposite side of them sits a real person in front of that PC screen.

The fact that Terrorzicke didn’t want to see what I had to say to her (it would have been easy enough for her to ask for authorisation, it takes one click after all), just shows what happens to people when they don’t want to be reasoned with: they become a caricature of themselves.

Protecting myself from complete exposure over the internet doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be heard, it rather tells you that when I accept you, I have properly seen you and want to enter into contact without. You’re not just another one of the mass that I don’t care about. And it will tell you that I don’t like to be spammed and have a pretty solid knowledge of spammers, useless twittbots and the like.

It becomes very apparent, that people who cannot even reconstruct an act of volition without error, cannot be asked to qualify what is scientific and what is not. And that is why this whole discussion is pointless. Who doesn’t want to hear, will never hear, not matter how loud we shout it.
Human thought will always be an exhilarating subject of study, while the measures of ’scientificity’ will always be subject to the last and current fashion of the times in which they are uttered.

yseult Issues communication, debate, Disputes between Scholars, Philosophy, science