A critique of Critiques

A critique of Critiques

Samuel Bird

I closed the book with a beaming smile on my face. The yellow lights gave a sense of warmth to the room despite the cracked windows and harsh northern winter. Between the twinkle of our stolen Christmas tree lights and having just read my first page in a book, my seven year old face was beaming. This was as good as life got right here. My older sister came into the room and saw that I was smiling too much. “I heard you reading out loud. You missed a few words. You also read too slow and your voice sounds dumb.” I hated being torn from my little moment of happiness and began to retort. “Hey, it is my first time. I think it went pretty good.” “Pretty well! See, you are dumb.” I looked to my mother, but because I was a boy and she hated men, she looked away. “I don’t know why you are trying to read.” My sister started up again. “We all know you are the stupid one and will never amount to anything.” “I think books have something I need to hear.” “And then what? You will now just have heard more ideas and stayed just as dumb.” “I am trying to find something to think about or believe in?” “Oh, some little philosopher huh? Trust me, I read lots of books, you aren’t smart enough to be a part of that.” “Well, I still want things to think about and believe in.” “Like what?” “I love science and ideas, history too.” “Name one thing you think.” I knew what would happen if I said it, but I wanted to feel like I could stand up to her. “I have read a lot of books about prisoners of war and concentration camps.” “Don’t you mean looked at the pictures?” I nodded to her blow as I continued. “As I have looked into their faces and thought about their lives, I have begun to think about their lives. I am angry that they were hurt, but I admire their strength. I want to do what I can to honor them.” “You make it sound like it was a good thing they suffered.” She barked. “It is people like you that caused the holocaust, thinking it met some better goal.” I removed myself from my body to not feel the horrendous shame that was about to follow as everything I ever thought or said was picked apart. When she left, I found my mother who had walked out, and asked what the holocaust was. “Why do you ask?” “Coraline said I caused it.”

The rest of my relationship with my sister was a battle of me trying to believe in something, and having it torn down. No idea was good enough, no belief sacred, no dream sufficient. I have since wanted to go back and ask her one question: What do you believe? I love my sister and see her harsh and vindictive voice comes from a deep place of hurt. While I choose not to fault her for this, it started a series of questions that has put me at odds with the society I have grown up in. My siblings and I were all involved in some type of counterculture movement. Some were sexual and political, but having been repressed for my gender enough, I moved toward the aesthetic and criminal. My siblings all rebelled against our mother. As I got to know my mother’s story better, I found she had just rebelled from her mother. From talking to my grandmother, I found that she had just rebelled against her mother. I now saw myself as a rebel to a rebel’s rebel. If we each were so sure the other was wrong, it was because we assumed a right. What then was that? I have since found few to no ideas in the public sphere that are ideas unto themselves. Rather, I see rehashes and critiques of old ideas. I am worried about my PHD advisor trying to push me to do another analysis on someone else’s work rather than trying to find something worth saying. Art and life have a reciprocal relationship in terms of being a mirror to see the other. Art has become no longer an expression of something original or at least authentic, but rather a co-opting of old ideas while breaking them apart. This is no coincidence as postmodernism is a powerful tool of deconstruction. While it does this well, when it is done destroying, it is only the jackhammer and not the framing hammer. When I asked a friend of mine who has taught at Harvard in philosophy some questions about postmodernism, he said he could not answer the question. As he was a genius, I probed deeper to find that he had compiled everything about postmodernism, to find that there were no specific claims of what that belief is. I think this is where it has been left unscathed in its warpath to tear down ideas, and that is, it is hardly one unto itself. Take the idea of deconstruction posed by Jacques Derrida, he would take a text and break it down into atomic portions. He would then show that each individual part has no meaning, therefore the whole does not either. This would be a fallacy of composition, however, as it assumes the same properties of a part are the properties of a whole. Think of your foot. Your toenail is dry, hard, and flat. The rest of the foot does not have these properties. The fallacy of composition does not guarantee a firm conclusion because it leaves out what a scientist would call “emergent properties.” I use this to my advantage all the time. The sum of the literal interpretation of the parts of my book, do not even approximate the meaning of the whole. Think of poems and poetic writing. I love this speech from Macbeth.

“There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

If we take this as literal and break it down, have some information about dates, time, candles, and other random notions. However, when this soliloquy is taken in whole and with a hearty dose of human mental construction, it has the emergent property of a character grieving not only a loss, but a failure. This is where the pretentious English teachers of my youth have something to say. What was really trying to be conveyed, or at least, what meaning do I pull from this? The above mentioned writing by Shakespere speaks to me of the deep cry within a mind, in rage about the extremities of existence. This does not come from pure and dry linguistics, but from a reading done as well as the writing. As a writer, it hurts when this effort to see an idea as larger and more implicit, is not taken. People will ask why I care about space rangers or dragons and swords. In doing so, they waltz right past the concepts that were offered and intended for their benefit. So then, why do I not just stop? At the end of Wittgenstein’s life, He had found the limits of language and with it, the limits of analytic philosophy. This left a gaping hole and frontier of metaphilosophy. While I wish to be one of its explorers, I think it has had a few travelers go across its dimly lit landscape. This would be the wild souls who found a convergence between the philosophical and the poetic. This would be those who breathed a life into words they didn’t have on their own. In this, there is much to be said. In this, there is much to be done. 

Now, this meaningless compiling of rebellions finding that everything can be broken down, finds their own idea can break down. While they scream there is no necessary meaning to life, they forget the power of creation and invention, or a possible meaning. This is where Esse Maxim comes in. I was weary and broken from a long life in a conversation between people refuting each other. I wanted something to think, to say, to believe in. It needed to be substantive and yet not be prone to such easy refutation. I knew when I started to write and share on Esse Maxim, it would once again open me to criticism as I knew from a young age. On one hand, I appreciate it, and it helps me be more concise and particular. On the other hand, I am left with the consolation, that even if I am wrong, I am the one saying something. This makes Esse Maxim a positive philosophy, not in terms of being happy and optimistic, but in terms of actually positing something. While it may have critiquing elements, it is not just another fight against existing beliefs. Esse Maxim could exist in a vacuum with nothing more than the simple facts of consciousness and existence. It is not, what I term reactionism. Reactionism would be ideas that only exist to react to existing ones. While Esse Maxim will never escape critique, it is something that finally is something without it. 

I have a close friend that was a peer in my early days in college. He was the teacher’s assistant in the first philosophy class I ever had. We would walk home after class as I would passionately and feverishly talk about some new half-baked idea as my voice got louder and more excited. We became very close friends, and found a sense of comradery and competition. I began to read voraciously and dig into anything I could get my hands on as time went on and I took more and more classes where he was the teacher’s assistant. He began to critique what I said more and more until I was taking a symbolic and predicate logic class. He would try to point out every possible fallacy and tear down every idea I had until I began to feel weak and helpless in this labor I loved so much. I kept trying to be patient and hearing him out and trying not to point out his fallacies when he pointed out mine. There came a day that he named an informal fallacy I committed and it had beaten me down too far. I ripped into that notion and explicated what the fallacy was, what I did, and what the difference was between the two. I then pointed out how I was tired of working and writing to build something, while he just tore me down and never had anything to say himself. You will be surprised to hear this, but he critiqued that. 

It escalated from being fiery and passionate, to cold and dead as my best friend became a passing critic. I made him the vice president of the philosophy society while I was president, but he never came, other than once, and he just came to make fun of what I had to say. He won’t read my books, listen to Esse Maxim, or even hear how he is wrong. I am not worried about him reading this now as he has completely given up on engaging. This has led to an important distinction. This friend of mine was much smarter than me. He had a higher I.Q. and had much better access to education. However, I have found it is never the people who have the most, but those that do more with it. Like my sister and the first editing group I’ve ever had, they love to tear down ideas, but are left with none of their own. This doesn’t make their critiques wrong, but it does make their efforts hollow. I have been and will be a fool as far as philosophers go. I have and will have to go through the shame of my ideas being foolish and weak. I will have to stand for something I am trying to figure out. I will have to be the one saying something into a vacuum of originality. However, I am consoled by the fact that I am starting to have something to say.