Thread by @deontologistics

This is close to @lastpositivist's #NoHeroes stance. I think I've a slightly different take on this, though not a substantially different one. I always try to begin with Stan Lee's maxim: "With great power comes great responsibility."

https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1368076434485477377

I think we have a responsibility to use whatever social power we accrue wisely, and this is the only thing that justifies such power. Yet I also think this is the flip side of Kant's principle of ought-implies-can: that we can't blame people for not doing things they can't do.

The (Hegelian) difficulty that the conjunction of these ideas faces is that, historically speaking, the growth of our (conscious) capacities for action precedes that of our (self-conscious) capacities for criticising/correcting these actions. We are destined to fuck up, a lot.

The difficult question is this: What's the appropriate attitude to historical figures whose sudden ability to wield social power in ways that was without precedent led to unprecedented fuck ups?

I think this is complicated, and almost always involves disarticulating the person qua person in retrospect. Surgically severing the better angels of their nature from their worse demons, opening them up to emulation and avoidance in equal measure.

Say what you like about Brandom's reading of Hegel, but he gives an incredibly good account of this retrospective character of historical reason, and the interplay between its impulses: Hegelian reconstruction (Whig history) and Nietzschean genealogy (Tory history).

It's important to see that 'personhood' is what unites these two tendencies in a way that prevents them from being pulled apart entirely. To treat historical figures as persons is to accept them, as @rechelon puts it, warts and all. To maybe forgive but never forget.

But how does this work at the cutting edge of history? How do you treat yourself as a person when you see there are things to be done and no one else is going to do them? How do you claim the authority that no one can rightfully give you, without evading its responsibilities?

This is where I substantively agree with @rechelon. One has to treat yourself as a person, which means doing everything in your power to signal your mere mortality to others: the fact that you are likely destined to fail in a variety of ways that at best will be learned from.

How this signalling should work, how it gets the job done, is itself a non-trivial problem that is inescapably linked to the moment and context you're in. There are lessons you can learn from the past, but performative personhood is something you're going to fuck up too.

While you have to be able to forgive yourself as a person in order to get anything done, you must under no circumstances permit yourself and others to forgive you as if you were already a figure lost to the past: a heroic exemplar ready for emulation/evasion.

To do so is at best to accept a sort of living death, to recuse yourself and let others take over, and at worst to cut yourself the most abominable slack, to legitimate your every foible for its purportedly world-historical relevance. There's little worse than pompous self-pity.

I think the point where I diverge slightly fro @rechelon, and lean slightly towards @lastpositivist, is that there are different schools of wisdom on how to avoid these pitfalls. There's unfiltered rawness, which I appreciate, but there's equally the craft of self-effacement.

Both have their own peculiar failure modes, from the temptations of brutal honesty (deontologistics.co/2019/10/29/tfe…) to the easy hubris of humour (c. Woody Allen). There's no formula for getting this right. It's ethics all the way down.

I've been thinking a lot lately about living on the ragged edge of history, and how to outgrow the systems of authentication one was shaped by without inventing worse ones patterned upon ones own peculiar personhood. How to claim authority without shirking responsibility.

In short, this ageing millennial is finally trying to grow up and maybe even wise up, in public, with all the embarrassing consequences that entails.

We get to make our own destiny, but we don't get to write our own history, and the war against our worse impulses is never over, no matter how many battles we win in the present.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1357752499722194948?s=20

Solidarity in personhood, my fellow cosmic children.🖖

CODA: The usual points of reference.

1. 'The Adults in the Room' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1361381891274903559?s=20

2. 'AI Ethics and Questions of Autonomy/Automation' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1363955404896677893?s=20

3. 'Dare to be Wise, Motherfuckers' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1355648568581890048?s=20

4. 'Algorithmic Bias and Bureaucratic Stupidity' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1366906638855192576?s=20

5. 'Dialectics and Dialogue' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1366149388138131458?s=20

6. A threading fuck up, linking to 'Promethean Wolf and Orphic Magpie' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1368139632077119488?s=20

7. And finally:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1347968282503098368?s=20

🖖

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1368139632077119488?s=20