Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-78)

Voltaire & Rousseau: I like / Anne

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was a French political writer and educator born in Geneva, Switzerland.

After taking various odd jobs this self-taught intellectual moved to Paris in 1741, meeting up with Denis Diderot and the Encyclopedists.

A kind of romantic naturalism pervades much of his work, best illustrated by the idea of the “noble savage” where stultifying conventions and religious promises of an afterlife are dismissed in favor of spontaneous desires and worldly affections.

In 1754 he wrote Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Amongst Men, outlining the apparently innate goodness of human beings in contrast to the corrupting powers of institutions.

In Luxembourg from 1757-1762 he wrote The Social Contract, which had a significant bearing on the French revolution, as exemplified by Rousseau’s cry for ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’

That same work produced the famous line, “man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.”

In 1762 he published the novel, Emile. Its critique of the monarchy and government bureaucracy compelled him to retreat to Switzerland, ultimately to end up in England with the support of the philosopher David Hume.

Rousseau later wrote his Confessions and returned to Paris in 1767, where he continued to write but apparently became delusional, believing that Hume was conspiring against him. » Enlightenment

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Relations of Production

Marx for Sale: malias / Gideon

Some interpreters of Karl Marx’s theory of history, such as G. A. Cohen, suggest that a distinction may be made between the forces of production and the relations of production.

According to this schema, the relations of production refers to the uniquely social aspects of production in a given society, usually the legal or brute force mechanisms of exploiting labor, extracting surplus and maintaining social dominance of the few over the many.

By way of contrast, the forces of production refer to the way a given society actually produces commodities.

At Earthpages.org

• Revisiting Marx (essay in PDF)

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Reification

State Theater, Congress Avenue: DaveWilsonPhotography / Dave Wilson

Reification is a sociological, philosophical and literary concept having to do with language and the pretty much universal process of symbolization.

According to sociologists, reification occurs when ideas, concepts or theories are assumed to accurately represent some real entity or thing–for instance, a theory about the ‘individual’ or, perhaps more easily understood, the ‘state.’

For instance, what is “Canada” or “The United States of America”? Aren’t these somewhat abstract ideas having a different meaning for each and every individual who ponders them? And even if we resort to the argument that these nations are distinguished by laws, citizenship and geographic boundaries, the same argument could apply.

Although it’s difficult for many to understand the notion that geographic boundaries are not absolute and indisputable markers, when we deconstruct the whole notion of physicality, things become less clear cut.¹

In philosophy the Greek Heraclitus alluded to reification when he asserted that we cannot step into the same river twice. And Willard Quine touches on the idea of reification by saying that empiricism contains “two dogmas.” One dogma is the distinction made between intellectual constructs and facts. The second dogma is reductionism; that is, the belief that naming and meaning are the same.

In the literary sense, reification may be said to occur whenever a metaphor is employed, although here it is accepted, encouraged and evaluated as to its poignancy. Meanwhile in rhetoric, it’s often a matter of debate whether reification is used appropriately.

While reified concepts may be simple or complex and involve detailed legal entities, the question remains as to whether the thing written and talked about really (or fully) exists as described.

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¹ Not to say that every thinker would agree or be able to appreciate this perspective.

On the Web:

• Wikipedia outlines several meanings for this term with useful illustrations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification

» Sociology, Unconscious

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System (The)

Lost in the system: id iom

The System

A term that describes and enables individuals to speak about various interlocking social institutions, discourses and practices in a positive, negative, ambiguous or ambivalent manner.

The idea of The System usually carries negative connotations, however.

This is perhaps best exemplified in the song lyrics of “Maybe the Poet” by Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn:

Don’t let the system fool you
All it wants to do is rule you

And more commonly, we hear people say something to the effect of… “s/he’s a nice person… I hope s/he doesn’t get gobbled up by the system.”

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Symbol

THE POWER OF LOVE: Material Boy / Aart van Bezooyen

Symbol

M. H. Abrams says that at the most fundamental level a symbol is anything that signifies something else.

Abrams also notes that a distinction is often made between the public and private symbol. The public symbol, such as the cross, is apparently understood by everyone in a given culture whereas the private symbol, such as an obscure poetic allusion, isn’t.

This distinction, however, seems open to debate: Surely not everyone in a given culture interprets the cross in the same way.

In literature a symbol is

a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something, or suggests a range of reference, beyond itself (A Glossary of Literary Terms, 2005, p. 320).

In depth psychology, Carl Jung says the symbol is a meaningful image that mediates healing or destructive forces from the collective unconscious to ego consciousness–for example, the symbol of the Cross or Serpent.

Jung says symbols arise from the unknowable archetypes but are recognized as archetypal images. Archetypes interpenetrate among themselves; likewise, archetypal images are discrete but exhibit similarities. For Jung the flow of psychic energy between the collective unconscious and the symbol is a two-way process.

Jungian Erich Neumann says that the symbol acts as both as an “energy transformer” and as a “moulder of consciousness.” As an energy transformer the symbol facilitates the ego’s experience of the numinous, arising from the collective unconscious. As a moulder of consciousness, the symbol operates on the level of collective consciousness by contributing to the ideology of a given culture.

Jung says the interconnected conscious and unconscious aspects of humanity cannot be severed. He’s widely quoted as saying in The Undiscovered Self (1958): 

You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.

Likewise, political leaders of the mass state cannot avoid being glorified or demonized. This occurs through brute force, clever calculation and also through public fascination and projection.

Jung believes, for example, that a mass-produced placard image of Joseph Stalin expresses an archetypal force articulated on the conscious level that both sways and oppresses individuals.

Skyscrapers: swisscan / Reto Fetz

A more contemporary example would be the disempowering psychological effect that massive bank towers (symbolizing ‘Big Business’) have on the poor and disenfranchised. And in ancient cultures such as Greece, Rome and Egypt, impressive architecture apparently had a similar effect on slaves, the exploited, the underprivileged and on less powerful visitors from foreign cultures.

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Suicide

Black Panther - Rue Emilie Durkheim: yoyolabellut / Lionel

Suicide

The issue of suicide has plagued humanity since ancient times.

The Greek and Roman Stoics condoned suicide in certain circumstances (such as extreme illness, loss of faculties or to avoid serving a tyrant), whereas the Christian theologian St. Thomas Aquinas unequivocally says “suicide is the greatest crime,” both against oneself and society.

The pioneering French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) published a statistical study that outlined four distinct types of suicide: Egoistic, Altruistic, Anomic and Fatalistic.

For Durkheim each suicide group corresponds to a specific type of societal orientation.

• Egoistic suicide arises from excessive individualism and lack of integration with a greater social purpose. Along these lines, Durkheim believes that Protestants suicide more frequently than Catholics because the former are not as tightly knit within their Church.

• Altruistic suicide arises from a lack of individualism combined with an excessive identification with some greater social purpose, such as the Japanese kamakazi pilots of WW-II or the Middle Eastern suicide bombers of the 21^st century.

Although the term “altruistic” sounds strange in this context, it should be stressed that Durkheim doesn’t make moral judgments within his theory. Rather, he tries to understand according to the type of relationship existing between the person committing suicide and their social group.

• Anomic suicide arises from a sense of alienation in a society lacking clearly defined meaning and characterized by diffuse social ideals. For instance, Durkheim found that high divorce rates coincided with high suicide rates.

• Fatalistic suicide is the opposite of anomic suicide. Fatalistic suicide is characterized by a sense of helplessness and futility in a harshly regulated social system, such as found in societies condoning master-slave relationships.

While this theory surely has his limitations, Durkheim remains important to the history of the social sciences because he looked at European demographics to try to understand suicide as a social phenomenon, just as social psychologists, advertisers and researchers gather and interpret data today.

More recently, the Hale Bopp Comet or Heaven’s Gate suicides of 1997 would probably be seen as altruistic suicide according to Durkheim’s schema.

Depending on one’s perspective, this California-based UFO cult or religious group believed the Earth was about to be destroyed. For members the only way to survive was to move on to a higher level, and to do this the group also believed they had to die at a precise cosmic moment, somewhat like jumping on a train when it’s in the station.

Because the Earth is still much the same as it was in 1997, it seems reasonable to say that this community was severely misguided.

At Earthpages.org:

• Revisiting Durkheim (includes an essay about Durkheim’s work, Suicide, in pdf format)

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Revisiting Durkheim

Sociology

Modern Type & Sociology Books by liikennevalo

Sociology

Sociology is usually defined in terms of the ’scientific’ or ’systematic’ study of society, two notions that postmodern – and just serious – thinkers today openly question.

The term was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), although others were thinking sociologically (i.e. examining social trends and truth claims) well before his time.

On the Web:

• For a mainline view, Wikipedia provides good coverage of the chief figures now known as part and parcel of sociology. » http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology

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Sign

Sign not in use by Joe Dunckley

Sign

In semiotics, the sign is the relation between a signifier and signified.

As an introduction to explaining the sign, Jeremy Hawthorn outlines a distinction between sign and symptom. The conventional understanding of the sign, he says, is entirely cultural while the symptom is entirely natural.

But Hawthorn notes that some theorists see the symptom as a subset of the sign. For instance, Michel Foucault’s study of the history of medicine and the ‘medical gaze’ suggests that an ironclad distinction between sign and symptom is questionable.

Speaking about the sign, itself, Hawthorn says that theorists like Jacques Lacan regard the relationship between signifier and signified as problematic because meanings are “shifting, multiple and context-dependent” (A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 161-163).

M. H. Abrams, defines signs as “conveyors of meaning” and notes that they apply not just to language and text but to a wide array of human activities and productions–e.g. morse code, traffic signals, what we wear, bodily postures, what we serve our guests for dinner, where we live, etc. (A Glossary of Literary Terms, eighth edition, Boston: Thomson, 2005, p. 289).

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Semiology (or Semiotics)

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Semiology (or Semiotics)

The study of signs. The term was coined by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), and semiology was originally taken to be a science.

But more recent theorists in several disciplines have questioned the entire notion of the ‘scientific enterprise,’ which some regard as just another sign.

Indeed, semiology includes or, one could say, branches off into postmodern deconstruction, an approach which questions the distinction between denotation and connotation, along with many other culturally implied truth claims, normative structures and practices.

Some argue that pioneering semiologists like Roland Barthes contained the seeds of what would become known as a postmodern approach.

» Baudrillard (Jean), Foucault (Michel), Sigified, Signifier, Structuralism, Wittgenstein (Ludwig Josef Johann)

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Scholarship

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Scholarship

Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx, Max Weber and other sociologists say that social institutions tend to legitimize and reproduce themselves.

Perhaps a slightly jaded view, some see universities as centers of knowledge dissemination that must justify high tuition fees and the reality of sometimes uninspiring, second-rate instructors.

Critics add that, as part of the process of legitimization and reproduction, universities produce a quota of publications, some of which wouldn’t survive in the free market beyond the confines of the university bookstores. And because textbooks are often keyed in with assignments and exams, students may feel pressured into paying inflated prices for books if they wish to do well in their courses.

The other side of this argument is that universities are specialized training centers, making tailor made textbooks necessary and costly by virtue of their relatively low circulation. Just as a detailed auto repair manual may never be a bestseller but is necessary for the auto mechanic, university books in the Humanities are necessary for the trade of “critical thinking.”

In fields such as history and religious studies, students – some of whom might not readily realize they are, in part, consumers of education – are implicitly or explicitly encouraged to associate the knowledge of original languages with scholarly legitimacy and coherent thinking. This is a fallacy often overlooked by those too easily dazzled by a phalanx of references in foreign languages. And one not need to look too far to find utterly shoddy articles which, perhaps, try to impress readers with a slew of references in various languages.

Along these lines, a postmodernist might argue that scholars should be just as concerned with recent language theory instead of conforming to the age-old tradition of upholding proficiency in languages as an emblem of scholarly legitimacy.

Further to Bourdieu’s claim that most scholarship doesn’t exist in isolation but in institutions laden with cultural connotations by virtue of their being accredited as universities and colleges, one might ask: What are these places really like? How do they function? How effective are they? And how do they connect with other social institutions and practices?

Historically speaking, centers of so-called higher education and their resident scholars vary dramatically. From the Confucian courts, the Old Academies of Plato and Aristotle, the ashrams of Sankara and Gorakhnath, the early Oxford and Cambridge, the University at Salamanca, the Renaissance University of Padua, the New Florentine Academy, to today’s Visva-Bharati and other unique universities around the world, the definition of quality education takes many forms.

Perhaps the relation among language, pedagogy and societal legitimacy is best summed up by Confucius, who in The Analects says:

A gentleman would be ashamed should his deeds not match his words.

» Digital Scanning, Equal Rights, History, Individual Rights, Sociology

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