Once again, I apologize to Nicolae for bogging his string down with one of my rhizomes. But points have come up in my reading of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that apply to yesterday’s rhizome as well as the original question:
“Can philosophy have any rules?”
“The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 63-64). Kindle Edition.
And I think this has application to Nicolae and Tom’s proposal that it should be about social justice as well as my proposal concerning the import of Play. Basically, Rorty starts the book by pointing towards the historical conflict between private and public approaches towards philosophy and culture in general: the private being about self creation and the public being about social justice, both of which must use language games that are incommensurable. And his solution is to simply accept the incommensurability while looking at the various language games as tools designed for various tasks:
“This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable.” –Ibid (different page….
And we can apply the distinction to the revised model I offered yesterday:
Private <--------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Public
Metaphysics/Ontology<>Epistemology/Logic<>Ethics/Aesthetics<>Social/Political
And when I talk about Play, what I’m mainly talking about lies at the Private side of the spectrum. Of course, my critics would be perfectly within their right in noting the bourgeoisie nature of Play given the esoteric relation the private has with Metaphysics: that which seems to work in the ivory tower of the academic/gods eye perspective and which would seem opposed to the informal data of the personal/anecdotal. I could hardly not begrudge a Habermas their resistance to my position on Play.
What I would argue in my defense, though, is that we are an evolving species and that Play plays an important role in that process. Once again: we started as simple organisms with scattered nervous systems that coalesced into central nervous systems that developed a bud that budded into the very brain that allows us to do what we are doing here. In that process, we started with a competitive mode that worked from immediate self interest to a cooperative mode in which we began to see it in our interest to look out for the interest of others. But the cooperative mode did not displace the competitive one; it developed alongside the fading usefulness of it in the face of the negative consequences it created. Think here of Global Capitalism and man-made climate change.
It is in this need to facilitate the evolutionary gravitation from the competitive to the cooperative that I see the value of Play along with the more public uses of philosophy. Think, for instance, of the Play involved in our dreams. Our brain basically engages in a kind of inventory turned into bricolage. It randomly forms hybrids of various memories until those hybrids result in something new, forms patterns that seduces it and that it stores in order to repeat them in different ways. And let us note here the scientifically backed theory concerning the role that dreams play in brain plasticity.
So it seems no wonder that philosophers like Rorty and Deleuze would emphasize the philosophical import of the arts (a form of public dreaming/Play (like they do: to facilitate and accelerate our evolution as a species for the sake of saving our species.