This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “words,” is said by the artist to be inspired by a post of philosopher Stephen Law, “Pseudo-profundity—from ‘Believing Bullshit.”
Believing Bullshit is Law’s own book published in 2011, and I hope to read it before too long. His post is in fact one chapter of that book, so you can read it to see if you want to go further. The post describes six kinds of pseudoprofundity and then tells us how to deal with them (mockery is one tactic).
The species “Post-modern pseudo-profundity” includes the following holotype produced by “the French intellectual Félix Guattari” (why are the French so prone to this kind of stuff?):
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis.
People who write like that should have their toenails pulled off! Yet a generation of college students was brought up to think that this was not only serious thinking, but good academic writing. Indeed, there are some evolutionary biologists whose prose isn’t that far from the above. I have a list of examples on my computer, but I’ll spare you and avoid indicting my colleagues.
But I digress. The cartoon:
It almost needn’t to be said that theologians, especially Sophisticated Theologians™, are perhaps the most prolix generators of pseudo-profundity. Here are two examples from Catholic theologian John Haught:
- “It is essential to religious experience, after all, that ultimate reality be beyond our grasp. If we could grasp it, it would not be ultimate.” (Deeper Than Darwin, p. 68).
This cannot be put into plain English because it involves not only a tautology but a misunderstanding of the word “ultimate.” What is ultimate reality anyway? Is that something different from the mundane proximate reality that we scientists and laypeople deal with?
Another:
- In any case, were I to try to elicit scientific evidence of immortality I would just be capitulating to the narrower empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief. What I will say, though, is that the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust in the desire to know. . . . Such a hope is reasonable if it provides, as I believe it can, a climate that encourages the desire to know to remain restless until it encounters the fullness of being, truth, goodness and beauty. (Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, pp. 203-204).
My translation: “I don’t need no stinking evidence! There’s an afterlife simply because I want there to be one.”
In other words: ultimate reality is god; therefore, it is beyond man’s understanding.
I wanted to joke that someone fed a dictionary to a bull and this is a result but then I realized that a lot of those words aren’t even words so, it’s not bullshit since he seems to have pulled it out of his own ass.
Donkey shit then.
I’m inclined to think that the quoted passage and others like it are not completely meaningless bs. I have a feeling the authors have some vague idea they want to get across but instead of just saying it they sprinkle unrelated words and phrases around in a somewhat skillful manner, to give the barest outline of what they want. Kind of like a jazz musician doing an over-the-top improvisation on a simple melody.
To be clear I think the whole exercise is crap, and even if you slogged through the whole morass and put in the effort to decipher it what you’d come away with wouldn’t be worth 2 minutes of your time.
Jargon can look like unintelligible gibberish to those non-expert in a field. I remember that about 30 years ago, when I was working for the IRS, someone sent Dear Abby [or Ann Landers?] a paragraph of the Revenue Code as an example of gibberish, that Abby [Ann?] agreed was incomprehensible. I, of course, had just read it with 100% comprehension, since doing that was my business. That said, I still find it hard to believe that there is any real meaning in that paragraph by Félix Guattari.
I think there’s a big difference. Your example is a case of “a bunch of words most people don’t know, used in a standard way.” If a layperson had the proper “IRS dictionary,” they could figure it out. OTOH Guattari’s case is a bunch of words scientists do understand and do know, used in a highly nonstandard manner. You could hand a person a “Science and Engineering dictionary” containing words like multi-dimensional, transverse, and catalysis, and Guattari’s sentences still couldn’t be figured out, still wouldn’t make sense.
He also seems to be combining jargon from multiple, very different disciplines (“ontological” is philosophy, “phylogenetic” is biology), which is IMO a very bad sign. Or a very good indicator of bullflop, if you prefer.
I think these guys have Lewis Carroll envy. Their model is the poem Jabberwocky. Alice critiques it best: “”It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”
It reminds me of Dan Dennett’s term “deepity”; but if you arrive at your pseudo-profundity by accident is this serendeepity?
That is very good!
In any case, were I to try to elicit scientific evidence of immortality I would just be capitulating to the narrower empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief.I can’t use science because I don’t have evidence.What I will say, though, is that the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust in the desire to know. . . .I hope there is a heaven so I’m going to keep believing.Such a hope is reasonable if it provides, as I believe it can, a climate that encourages the desire to know to remain restless until it encounters the fullness of being, truth, goodness and beauty.Stop making fun of me just because I believe in fairy tales. (Is Nature Enough?Meaning and TruthRemaining ignorant in the Age of Science, pp. 203-204).Beautifully done!
Agreed!
Nice.
Oh, and somehow you manage to keep your toenails intact while parsing. Well done!
Intact, but maybe in a bag.
By my translation there is an obviously incorrect assertion: that belief in an afterlife and the supernatural promotes curiosity and a desire to learn. It seems to me it does the opposite. At the very least it provides a strong bias that hinders ones ability to understand what one does learn about the world.
I think you may have mistranslated a bit. All that verbiage describing the climate that a belief in The Afterlife encourages is not to be taken as literally as you have taken it. It should be taken as a metaphor for encouraging people to not waste their time and effort to try and understand reality and be the author of their own purposes, but to just sit back and let the religious authorities do all that heavy lifting for you.
Yes I would agree. The concept of a post-death reward for belief or moral living has (IMO) historically been used to support the status quo and stop people from questioning whether it’s a good way to do things. ‘You don’t have to worry about the unfair serfdom or caste system, because after you die you’ll be rewarded for being a well behaved serf or untouchable.”
It’s the love of adjectives to add weight to the paper as if there was a required minimum to get the expression received.
Yes, this interests me too. These writers are clearly trying to persuade others as well as themselves to believe what they probably intuitively suspect is bullshit. So, how self conscious are they about calculating the right number of obscure adjectives and made- up nouns to affect an adequate smokescreen? I wonder if Haught doesn’t fall asleep worried that he overplayed the subterfuge, or if he should have added one more obtuse phrase?
That’s easy to put in plain English. It says:
+1
Yes. This really is not an admission Haught would want to make, I would think. It is honest though, so I applaud him for that. It isn’t often you can get someone like him to admit out loud that religious methodologies for discovering truths includes simply identifying what must be the case for a prior unevidenced belief to be true.
+1
Many here might enjoy (if you have not already seen it) a recent paper with the delightful title of “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”. It was published in the Journal “Judgment and decision making” by G Pennycook and in it Deepak Chopra’s tw**ts figure prominently.
Enjoy!
http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf
I saw a blurb online about that! One thing that is funny is that they say ‘bullshit’ several times in a science paper. The blurb is here: http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/acceptance-profound-sounding-bs-linked-lower-intelligence
“Bullshit” is now seemingly a category in philosophy books, and I don’t mean the Heideggerian kind, I mean books like the one mentioned and the reprint of Frankfurt’s famous paper in book form.
I don’t have access to Philosopher’s Index anymore. Can anyone who does check to see if it really has made it as a category? 🙂
That is pretty funny. So you can have philosophers referring to other philosophers that they do not agree with as the ‘bullshitians’.
Bovinexcrementarians?
That’s a fun read. It addresses many questions about bullshit receptivity that are very relevant to much of the conversation at WEIT. I personally am very often puzzled by the level of non-skepticism we encounter in everyday reading. The study evaluates several hundred students for many intellectual traits. One meaty conclusion:
“…both ontological confusions and religious belief were positively correlated with bullshit receptivity.”
All academic fields are prone to this. From Linguistics, I give you the chomskybot: http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl
‘(why are the French so prone to this kind of stuff?)’
Because Descartes?
No, Cartesianism is the opposite of this bs.
As well as Voltaire.
But you can blame it on Rousseau and his intellectual descendants, such as Nietsche and Marx/Engels. Dialectical materialism is a good start in this race to the bottom.
Well, Descartes is a little like that, it seems to me. He starts out by denying everything — including g*d — except thinking. Then he builds up a whole rational structure until, at the end, he opens the back door and lets g*d creep in again. ‘Course if he hadn’t, he might have ended up much warmer than he did (at the court of Sweden). The French are descended from Descartes and they say so regularly. He of course was a dualist and a descendant of Plato, who was also a dualist in his way.
We anglophones are descended rather from the English empiricists, Berkeley, Locke and Hume, so we tend to look at what is around us, rather than what we think is inside.
Just my opinion, arrived at after many years of observing them in action.
But Descartes is also fairly clear, doesn’t use terminology from other disciplines without regards to their original meanings or write long-winded sentences. He would be appalled by Guattari and the like, I’d think. You can imagine *debating* Descartes and having a good time at it; with the pomos there’s no hope.
Absolutely. I mean that so-called rationalizing disconnected from empirical reality is what can eventually lead to such silliness.
God’s will is beyond our grasp except when it happens to align with my deeply held opinions on homosexuality, sex, abortion, in vitro fertilization, birth control, sexual prophylaxis, doctor assisted death, state supported religious indoctrination etc., Ad nauseam.
Then it is abundantly clear.
Didn’t philosopher Maarten Boudry use genuine quotes from John Haught in his hoax abstract that got accepted at a Christian philosophical conference?
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
My translation: believing in God makes you a better person. Or, perhaps, it signifies to yourself and others that you already are one of the better kind of people. You have hope, trust, an open mind — love in your heart, poetry in your soul. A favorable disposition towards the supernatural places one in a favorable disposition, period.
This stands in marked contrast of course to the kind of person who doesn’t or can’t believe in God: narrow, cold, and lacking in a capacity to feel wonder and think outside the box. The closed mind begets a closed heart.
Daniel Dennett didn’t just coin the term “deepity” — he also wrote a good deal about “belief in belief.”
Sastra, that so insightfully captures the attitude of theists, in particular “liberal/sophisticated” theists especially.
Sophisticated Theologians™ – prolific peddlers of pseudo-profundities.
Shorter John Haught: “Death… I don’t want to know anything about. Oh, and magic man!”
The Jesus n Mo cartoon here reminds me of the Sphinx in the movie Mystery Men.
Of course, sometimes formulaic profundity can work in our favor. I like this one:
“If you have problems with your religious fundamentalists … then maybe the problem is with the fundamentals of your religion.”
OOoo
Sastra, that last quote is wonderful! Is it original with you? If not, do you know the source?
No, it’s not mine. I didn’t write down where I found it when I copied it a while back, but a google search includes several possible sources, including science journalist Bahar Gholipour and Atheist Republic.
When you fail to give credit, your credit will fail.
There’s a link between muddled thinking and muddled prose! I’m reminded of Orwell’s 6 rules for good writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
———-
By the way, Deepak Chopra, it seems to me, is naturally adept at pseudo-profound thinking and prose. I’m a huge fan of poetry and poetic writing (like the plays of Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard), but Deepak makes you want to scrape off all the poetic crud in his sentences and demand that he start over and think clearly.
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”
― Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams
“You must be like the wolf pack… not like the six-pack.”
“Learn to hide your strikes from your opponent and you’ll more easily strike his hide.”
“When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.”
“He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.”
“Do not go there, my son! When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts.”
“Sometimes, the true hero is the one with the courage to run away.”
“When you care for what is on the outside, what is inside cares for you.”
“To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.”
Why thank you, Mr. Mysterioso.
“The species “Post-modern pseudo-profundity” includes the following holotype produced by “the French intellectual Félix Guattari” (why are the French so prone to this kind of stuff?):
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis.”
This reminds me of the recent controversy over fake scholarly articles using this type of obscure writing style to pass off gibberish as scholarly work. The articles were submitted to real journals and sometimes accepted for publication, showing how little actual through goes into the publication decisions (at some journals, anyway).
The only philosophical or theological conclusion I draw from this is that human language is flexible enough to state paradoxes. See Prof. Haught, the reason you can’t grasp the ultimate is because only married bachelors can do that.
Or you could always see it this way:
Ohh, homo-ecclesiastic.
The quotation from Félix Guattari could easily be something from the Elsewhere.org “Postmodernism Generator”: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
(It will generate a new page of content every time you refresh your browser.)
In the past I’ve heard stories of students turning in output from the Postmodernism Generator as their own work and getting good grades from it. I’ve always regarded such stories at urban legends but I may have to reconsider that opinion.
>I have a list of examples on my computer, but I’ll spare you and avoid indicting my colleagues.
Perhaps you’ll share it privately with me and Matthew, although we could probably guess a few of them… 😉
I just don’t read stuff like this when I come across it. I make the assumption that anyone who writes like this is doesn’t know the subject well enough to express themselves clearly and/or isn’t as smart as they want the reader to assume. Therefore they’re not worth the effort.
A few months ago I tried to write a comparison between something Jerry had written and something someone else had written on the same subject. I never got it done. The reason? Every time I tried to read what the paper by “someone else” I either fell literally asleep (3×, in the middle of the day!), or my mind simply drifted off elsewhere.
There’s a lot of stuff worth reading out there, including most of the comments on this website, without resorting to bs.
You said it!
Theologians like John Haught confuse statements about the psychology of religion with statements about God, though I give him brownie points for labeling the afterlife as an object of hope rather than firm knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”
Jacques Derrida is the worst in this department I have ever encountered re philosophy.
The most obscurantist theologian I have ever encountered is the over-vaunted Bernard Lonergan.
(At least with John Haught I know exactly what he means to say, even if I think his argument poor and his conclusion wrong.)
The feeling I get when I read deepities is the same feeling I get when someone slyly or unwittingly divides by zero to show that 2 = 1.
We are fortunate to see Jesus and Mo’s wisdom brought low unto us mere mortals, we who must some day pass the great beyond. Their wisdom will remain to be passed among the still living.
My dog whimpers in his sleep, his restless dreams power his twitching feet.
Send me your money.
It’s what you climb with a ladder of RURPs.
A RURP is a Realized Ultimate Reality Piton, a piece of climbing equipment. It’s designers claimed that they were good boys and were not pharmaceutically inspired when they named it, but I don’t think anyone really either cares or believes them.
I do believe these were made obsolescent by the invention of the skyhook (which, Willy Wonka explained to Charlie, are what holds up the Great Glass Elevator).
Having had both skyhooks and RURPS on my rack (and used neither), I don’t think they’re “obsolete”. But even in my “vertical gibbering” youth they were on the way out because camming devices and nuts were just plain better uses of the weight. Pitons, for example rarely got used at all in summer, because of the weight of the hammer (in winter, you just swap one of your claws for an ice hammer).
I immediately thought of Daniel Dennett’s Deepity, so I was chuffed to see that it is indeed is one Law’s six subtypes of pseudo-profundity, and with proper attribution!
Dawkins was commenting on this topic on twitter recently, including lauding Alan Sokal’s excellent work in exposing the absurdity of (at least some) postmodernism, and I saw someone (a grad student, I believe) subsequently threaten him with violence for the perceived insult to Guattari. I’d be hard pressed to find it again, though.
I once had a teacher, when studying Law, who wrote like that. I actually cried out of desperation over one of his “compulsory reading” books. I could not understand a single line. At 18 I was very insecure and thought maybe I was too stupid and did not belong in University. After a while, I saw he was just a narcissistic jerk. So I played his game. When the time came for the final exams and papers I started by extolling the depth of his intellect and assuring him how impressed I had been by his erudition and prose. Followed by some pseudo intellectual bullshit of my own (peppered with a few selected phrases from his works). The trick worked and I walked out with the maximum grade. I had a certain uneasy feeling of having been a bit dishonest (whorish even) but I needed the grade and he was a total moron.
Nicely done!
Pre Internet this would of been unreadable as is I still had to look up about 6 words never had to do that before out side of high end technical manuals thanks for the vocab work our. Didn’t make much sense when I did look them up but I think that was the point
Two points:
1.) Jargon can serve many purposes, but one purpose is precision to those who understand the jargon. Heidegger developed more-or-less his own jargon, as has Daniel Dennett. Both authors are worth studying (IMHO), but Dennett takes some getting used to, and Heidegger is just hard to read and understand without multiple readings and background.
I don’t take anything profound out of the passage you selected, it could very well be the author is engaging in obscurantism (another use of jargon) but I would be careful. I realize with so much obscurantist post-modernist dreck being published today it is probably a rational bet that this is probably pretentious junk.
2.) On ultimate reality: I don’t want to defend modern theologians, but if we start from intelligibility, what renders something intelligible is “higher” than the thing it makes intelligible. For example, Newton’s laws make the motion of bodies intelligible (predictable) so the laws are “higher” than the movement of bodies.
From this perspective, formal concepts are “higher” than observables because they make observables intelligible (I see a tree, not a sensation). These formal concepts are also necessary for communication between persons (“I saw your purse over there”).
Generally, what makes conceptual fields intelligible is hierarchy, for example, in taxonomy, KPCOFGS, starting from most specific to most general. Of course, once you have hierarchy, you have imposed some kind of value on things (two is bigger than one, etc.).
Concepts make the observable world intelligible, hierarchy and value make concepts intelligible, so that leaves the question of what the source of hierarchy and value is (e.g. is hierarchy and value intelligible?).
The answer is that hierarchy and value are not intelligible. Their source is “nothing”, or at very least, a “something”, about which nothing can be said.
In the concept of a limit, there is inherently a notion of something beyond the limit–otherwise you have no limit. To say thought has a limit implies that there is something beyond thought but unthinkable, ultimate in this sense.
The law of noncontradiction, a tautology that literally says nothing, at the same time expresses the universal condition of intelligibility, of identity and difference. Because of its universality, it is by nature unintelligible, lacking difference and ergo identity.